


Monsters by Moonlight

by tastewithouttalent



Category: Durarara!!, Servamp (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Biting, Blood, Blood Drinking, Blow Jobs, Concussions, Developing Relationship, F/M, Hand Jobs, Literal Sleeping Together, Love Confessions, M/M, Minor Character Death, Partnership, Punching, Sadism, Self-Hatred, Stabbing, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-07 04:03:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 63,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8782141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tastewithouttalent/pseuds/tastewithouttalent
Summary: "Shizuo needs to get into a different line of work." Shizuo is less than thrilled with both his current job and his assigned partner, but when forced to choose between the two, it's a less than complicated decision.





	1. Partner

**Author's Note:**

> This fic now has truly gorgeous fanart for it, done by the lovely and talented varrix! Check out the cover [here](https://varrix.tumblr.com/post/160667764236/maybe-you-were-always-meant-to-be-my-prey) (note that it contains plot spoilers)

Shizuo needs to get into a different line of work.

This isn’t the first time he’s thought this. He’s fairly sure the idea has crossed his mind with every assignment he goes out on, with every screech of metal giving way to the force of his hold as he wrenches it free from its support. He’d like something peaceful, he thinks now, as the straight line of a stop sign caves to the weight of his hold, tearing itself free of the flat pavement underfoot rather than offering any real resistance to his pull. He could be a librarian, maybe, could spend the whole of his days ensconced in the forced quiet of the space with the rustle of pages turning instead of the whistle of a winter wind through the night-dark streets around him. It would be nice to weight his fingers gently against covers, he tells himself as metal collapses under his fingertips to form handholds of the signpost in his grip, would be pleasant to speak in a pseudo-whisper instead of the growling rumble of incoherence he’s currently offering as he lifts his head to scowl down the darkened alley. Most of all, he thinks, it would be good to meet the regular visitors, to make friendly small talk about the unseasonably warm December they’ve been having or ask for recommendations for the newer restaurants in town. He could develop a routine, could form the framework of acquaintanceship between himself and those he works with, could go home at night tired but satisfied with his work for the day.

The blow lands hand. Shizuo only barely has time to see the fist arcing through the dark of the air around him, and no chance to dodge at all; the impact slams into his shoulder, knocking him enough off-balance that he has to stumble to regain his footing, has to blink to clear the shock from his vision, and while he’s still shaking himself back into coherency there’s the growl of a laugh, of amusement too rough and dark to allow for any sharing of it.

“You stupid hunters.” When Shizuo looks up to scowl into the darkness there’s a figure there, the shape of a young man standing in front of him where Shizuo would swear there was nothing at all before. “None of you stand a chance against us when you come after us at night.”

Unfortunately, he’s not a librarian.

“You don’t give me much choice,” Shizuo growls right back, attaining something close to his attacker’s tone even if his shoulders are too tense with adrenaline to make an attempt at imitating the other’s casual stance. “Anytime you want to come out during the daylight hours, drop me a line.”

“I don’t think so.” The other takes a half-step back, tipping his body sideways like he’s thinking of retreating, or maybe like he’s preparing for a run-up into the violence of another attack. “I don’t think I want to give you any more of an advantage than you already have. Unless you’re a subclass too?”

“I’m no vampire,” Shizuo tells him.

The other -- the subclass -- shrugs dismissive acceptance. “If you say so. I’m impressed, you know, there’s not many humans as strong as you.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo says, “I’ve been told” and he’s moving at once, taking a long step forward and swinging the sign in his hands as hard towards the other’s head as he can. At full strength it’ll cause some pain, at least, vampiric resilience or no; but the subclass lifts a hand, shoving hard against the flat of the sign as Shizuo swings it to push himself aside by several feet. Shizuo turns to follow, moving as quickly as the vampire does; he can see the flash of sharp teeth as the subclass grins, can see the focus of those inhuman eyes catching the moonlight to sparkle into what some instinctive part of Shizuo’s body recognizes as threat.

“You can’t beat me,” the subclass says, ducking under another swing of Shizuo’s makeshift weapon before straightening to give the other a pitying look. “Did someone tell you you were strong enough to go vampire hunting and make a hero of yourself? How many gothic melodramas have you watched?”

“None,” Shizuo tells him, swinging the sign back for another attempted attack that goes as wide as the last. “I don’t watch television.”

“You’re one of the old-school novel readers, then,” the subclass decides. “Or are you from the new group of manga fans? It doesn’t make a difference to me, anyway.” He catches the sign as Shizuo swings it this time, his hold only rebounding by an inch before his fingers close tight around the pole; Shizuo can feel the sign rattle in his grip as the subclass twists the metal to invert on itself until the sign is nearly flush against Shizuo’s bracing arm. “You’re outclassed anyway. Whatever shiny techniques you think you know aren’t going to work against a real-life vampire. We’re a lot tougher than the stories make us seem.” Shizuo shakes the sign free of the subclass’s hold and makes a vague attempt to hit the other full across the face; this time the vampire grabs at the signpost just over Shizuo’s grip on the metal and pulls hard enough to forcible drag the other towards him. He’s grinning, Shizuo can see the sharp points of his teeth gleaming in the light; his whole expression reeks of smug victory, like he’s revelling in his own success in advance of actually securing it. Shizuo sets his jaw on the surge of irritation that runs through him, lets his frustration curl into the set of his fingers into a fist, and when he swings it’s with the full force of his arm up to the arc of his shoulder, the whole strength of his body falling into alignment to slam the weight of his knuckles hard against the subclass’s lower jaw. The vampire’s head snaps sideways, Shizuo can feel bone crack to the force, and the other’s grip on the signpost between them goes slack as he stumbles to the side in off-balance echo of Shizuo’s own initial movement.

“I dunno,” Shizuo growls, flexing his fingers closer against his palm. “You don’t seem all that tough to me.”

“ _You_ ,” the subclass hisses, twisting back to glare inhuman rage at Shizuo as he gets his feet back under him and gets a hand pressing against the agony of damage Shizuo’s punch must have done to his jaw. “I’m going to tear you to _ribbons_ , I’ll make you _beg_ for my mercy.”

“You can try,” Shizuo says.

“You _upstart_ ,” the subclass snaps at him as he takes another step in to close the distance between himself and Shizuo. His gaze is fixed on Shizuo’s face; Shizuo is very sure he’s not paying any attention at all to his surroundings anymore for how viciously furious his fixation is. “I’ve been dodging C3 for _decades_ and you think a kid like you can just waltz onto the street and pick a fight because you’re a little bit _strong_?” He lifts a hand to smack across Shizuo’s face; Shizuo tips backwards and out of range, feeling his scowl tighten with the edge of impatient frustration as the vampire hisses vicious rage in the back of his throat. “Don’t make me laugh.” The subclass swings again, his fingers tensing to claw-like edges, and Shizuo takes a half-step sideways to dodge only for the vampire’s foot to come up with bruising force to slam hard against the outside of his knee, the impact sharp and sudden enough that Shizuo grunts with the force and drops to fall to the pavement under him. He lands hard, his palms thrown out to tear against the rough surface as he catches himself, and over him the vampire cackles amusement, his head tipped down with gloating satisfaction over Shizuo in front of him.

“I’m going to have _fun_ showing you just how wrong you are,” he declares, the words smoothing into something darkly savage as he speaks. “Let’s play a game, shall we? You can try to take me out, and for everything you try that doesn’t work I’ll try it on you back!” He leans forward, bracing his hands against his legs so he can tip in close over Shizuo lying underneath him. “You might want to be careful about what you pick to start, though. The stake-through-the-heart trick is going to be a lot worse for you than it is for me.”

“Yeah?” Shizuo says. “How about we give it a try?”

The subclass’s smile flickers, his expression tightening on confusion. “What--” he starts, and then his words go still, his voice giving way to a startled exhale of air as the point of a stake emerges from the front of his chest. He turns his head down, his forehead creasing into confusion as he does; when he lifts a hand to touch the wood it’s only for a moment before he snatches his fingers back as if he’s been burned.

“Holy water,” he manages, his voice creaking in the back of his throat like it’s crumbling apart even as he pushes the words past his lips. He lifts his head, his eyes wide and shocked as they fix on Shizuo. “You _are_ with C3.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo says. “We are.” The subclass’s gaze flickers, he starts to turn his head over his shoulder; but the movement is jerky, effort visibly struggling through the action, and he goes still before he completes the turn, the paralytic effect of the holy-water-soaked wood finally settling into the unflowing blood in his veins. He teeters for a moment, upright over the precarious balance of his feet; and then there’s motion, a shift of movement as the stake through his chest twists slightly, and his frozen form drops sideways to hit the ground with boneless force and reveal the silhouette of the person standing behind him. The newcomer’s hair is darker even than the vampire’s, a black so saturated it seems to drink in the faint blue of the moonlight overhead; but his grin is bright enough to compensate, the edge of it just as raw and vicious as the one the subclass offered alongside his threats.

“Thanks for the help, Izaya,” Shizuo growls, sarcasm rough in his throat as he gets an aching hand under himself to push to his feet. “Were you just planning to stand there watching while he tore me open?”

“Of course not.” Izaya tips his head back to watch Shizuo as he straightens. His eyes look almost black in the shadows of the night around them. “I would have saved you eventually, Shizu-chan.”

“That’s very reassuring,” Shizuo tells him. “Why do you insist on waiting until the last minute to step in? He was distracted long before you came in, you could have taken him out at any time.”

“It wouldn’t have been as much fun,” Izaya says, as easily as if this is a valid response. He looks away from Shizuo’s glare, still grinning that sharp-edged smile that looks like the shine of light off an open blade, and kicks a foot out to knock against the stake through the fallen subclass. “It’s so much better to wait until they think they’ve won, they always look so surprised.”

“Sadist,” Shizuo tells him, pulling Izaya’s gaze back to him for a moment as the other’s mouth twists over amusement. “We’re bringing them in because it’s our job, not because it’s _fun_.”

“Speak for yourself,” Izaya shrugs. “You can resign yourself to being miserable if you want, it’s none of my business how you live your life. I just choose to take some satisfaction in the work I do.”

“The work _I_ do,” Shizuo tells him. “I didn’t see you ready to take a punch in pursuit of your _entertainment_.”

“Of course not,” Izaya says. “That punch would have shattered my collarbone and I really prefer to keep myself more or less intact. That’s why I have you to be the distraction.”

“You mean the punching bag.” Shizuo scowls down at Izaya, but Izaya just flashes the bright of that smile up at him as if Shizuo is beaming at him instead of glaring. “How about I demonstrate just how much that hit hurt so you can share the suffering with me?”

“I’ll pass,” Izaya says, looking down at the vampire in front of them. “We have to take the spoils of our victory back to headquarters, anyway.” He shifts his weight again, tipping himself easily to the side as he kicks out against the stake again to drive it a little farther into the vampire’s still form. “I wonder if they can feel things when they’re paralyzed like this. Isn’t that an interesting thought?”

“Stop it,” Shizuo sighs, and reaches out to grab at Izaya’s shoulder and pull him bodily away from kicking any further at the fallen subclass. “We’re just supposed to bring them in, you don’t need to be so sadistic about it.”

“I’m not being sadistic,” Izaya tells him as Shizuo drops to a knee so he can pick up the dead weight of the subclass and heave it over his shoulder. “They’re _monsters_ , Shizu-chan, it’s not like you need to worry about their feelings.”

This is a familiar argument, the path of it too well-worn for even Shizuo’s hair-trigger irritation to gain traction on. He rolls his eyes instead, sighing the weight of resignation into the cold of the air around them as he pushes to his feet again, this time with the burden of the unconscious subclass draping over his shoulder. “Whatever. Let’s get back before he comes around and we have a fight on our hands all over again.”

“I have more stakes,” Izaya volunteers. “I could make sure he stays down.”

“No,” Shizuo growls. “We’re supposed to bring them in _alive_ , not made into pincushions.” He jerks his head in the vague direction of the C3 headquarters and takes the lead down the darkened street, bracing the collapsed vampire over the support of his shoulder as he goes. “Come on, Izaya.”

“I follow your lead, as ever,” Izaya lilts, dropping into step behind Shizuo. This is complete nonsense -- Shizuo is sure Izaya’s been steering him for his own purposes ever since they were assigned to work together three years ago -- but he doesn’t protest this claim any more than he ever does.

In the end, he’d rather have Izaya guarding his back than anyone else.


	2. Lead

The new mission comes hard on the heels of the last. They’ve been arriving closer together, Shizuo thinks; he can remember he used to have weeks between assignments, hours of empty time each day to occupy with idle training while the other C3 members were assigned to more complex tasks, like the infiltration and information gathering Izaya is sometimes pulled into. But there must be more subclasses in recent months, or perhaps it’s that Shizuo and Izaya’s teamwork has finally hit a level higher than it was originally, because today Shizuo barely gets a full night’s sleep before he’s being called in to meet with the director. It’s a matter of a few minutes to change his shirt and run a hand through his hair, and then he’s heading towards the main office without further delay to find out what his latest project is going to be.

Director Kuzuhara is on his feet paging through a folder when Shizuo comes into his office, pushing the door open after a perfunctory tap against the weight of it. He’s always standing, that Shizuo has seen; as far as he can tell the chair on the far side of the heavy desk in the middle of the room has never been used except as something for visitors to look at. The desk is always covered with neat lines of reports and documents, offering all the tells of intent investigation along with Kuzuhara’s personal touch in rigid tidiness; today there’s a full inch of papers in the file left open to face the other side of the desk. Shizuo could pull it around towards himself if he wanted, could eye the documents in an attempt to gain a headstart on the information the director will be giving him; Izaya would, he knows, would make the most of the opportunity to appear far better informed than he is in truth. Shizuo does not. He ignores the papers, and fixes his eyes on Kuzuhara’s back, and says, “You wanted me for debriefing?”

“Yes,” Kuzuhara says without turning around or looking up from the document in his hands. “You arrived in a timely fashion, Heiwajima.” He nods at whatever he’s reading, a sharp motion of acknowledgment of some piece of information, and then snaps the folder shut and reaches to replace it on the bookshelf alongside several other overfull files. It’s only then that he turns back around to fix Shizuo with his attention, and it’s only as he turns that his expression weights into the burden of a frown. “Where’s Orihara?”

Shizuo frowns back. “I have no idea.”

Kuzuhara reaches to push his sunglasses a little higher up his nose, even though the lighting in the room is nothing like bright enough to require any kind of eye protection. Shizuo’s never seen him without them; he can hardly imagine the other’s face absent the mirrored finish blocking his eyes. “You had a mission together last night, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Shizuo admits. “We took out the subclass and brought him back to headquarters for processing, just like you asked us to. I don’t know where Izaya went after that, I never know what he’s up to when we’re not on missions.”

“Hm.” Kuzuhara checks his watch. “We’re on a limited time frame; I’ll debrief you and then you can catch him up prior to going out.” He steps in towards the open file on his desk, reaching out to weight his fingers at the edge of it and tap a steady rhythm against the paper. “We’ve been collecting information for several weeks on a new lead, and we finally have enough data to act in full expectation of success. Time will be of the essence to make the most of this opportunity; creating another chance like this would be the work of another several weeks, at least.” He braces his fingers at the edge of the file, pushing hard to twist it over the surface of the desk so it faces Shizuo as he reaches out to press a finger to the edge of a photograph. “That’s your target.”

Shizuo braces a hand against the edge of the desk and leans in. The man in the picture doesn’t look particularly threatening; he’s smiling wide into the camera, his whole face so bright with enthusiasm Shizuo almost wants to squint at the sunbright glow of the other’s smile. Aside from the oddity of the lab coat he’s wearing, he doesn’t look anything like the usual dour or vicious subclasses Shizuo is used to going after. “He is? He doesn’t look like anything very dangerous, is it really that much of an opportunity? I could take him out myself even without Izaya.”

“It is,” Kuzuhara intones. “He’s not the primary target.” He reaches for the edge of the report and flips it up to show the sheet underneath. There’s far less information on this one; the documentation is more white space than the wall of text that covers the other. Kuzuhara pushes the page back until Shizuo can see the much lower-quality image attached the top corner of the page, a photograph as much shadows and blurry focus as anything else. Kuzuhara’s finger stabs down at the top corner of it as if he can hold the subject as still as the paper. “She is.”

“She…?” Shizuo squints at the picture. It’s hard to make out the form Kuzuhara is referring to at all; he would never have been able to make a guess as to her gender, much less stand a hope of recognizing her even in full daylight. “Are they a pair or something? Don’t you want both of them…” and then he trails off as an idea presents itself, the possibility of it so startling that for a moment he can’t even hold it in his head as a reasonable option.

“No,” Kuzuhara says. “If he gets himself into trouble on his own, it’s a problem for the police. We’re not going to interfere with humans.”

“He _is_ human,” Shizuo says, feeling a little like this information has hit him with the force of a physical blow. “So she really is--”

“A Servamp.”

The voice comes from the doorway, almost exactly behind Shizuo; he would be startled by the sudden addition to the conversation if he didn’t recognize the tone so instantly. As it is he’s scowling before he turns around, his expression tightening into irritation as he looks back to Izaya standing framed in the outline of the doorway. He’s ready to hiss frustration at the other, to snap some rhetorical question about where Izaya has been and why he’s only just now arriving; but for once Izaya isn’t looking at Shizuo at all. His gaze is fixed on the table and the report turned around towards the two of them, and it’s only as he takes a step forward to push past Shizuo like he doesn’t see him that Shizuo picks out the low thrum of excitement from that one word on Izaya’s lips. “You tracked one of them down.”

“Yes.” Kuzuhara pushes the file farther over the table, making an offering of the information within, and Izaya reaches for it at once, pulling the file in towards himself and lifting it so he can flip rapidly through the pages within. His head is bowed over the sheets, his attention completely fixed to them; Shizuo’s scowl is left to fall unobserved against the back of Izaya’s neck, where the shadow-black of his hair is falling forward to leave the very top vertebrae of his spine pressing clear under the skin. “It’s been almost impossible to find leads on them. The Servamps themselves are very careful of us, many of them have had run-ins with my less...successful predecessors.” The adjective is a euphemistic choice; Shizuo thinks he would have gone with _fanatical_ , himself, but he doesn’t say anything to interrupt either Kuzuhara’s speech or Izaya’s perusal of the pages in front of him. “This one has a new Eve, though, probably picked up sometime in the last few months, and he lacks subtlety.” From the stack of reports Izaya’s rifling through, that seems like something of an understatement. “We’ve been closing in on them for weeks and we’ve got them pinned down now.”

“For how long?” Izaya asks, looking up from the papers to turn the focus of his attention on Kuzuhara. His eyes are bright, his mouth set; there’s a strange, manic attention in his features, the same look Shizuo usually only sees from him at the end of a mission, when Izaya is standing over a fallen subclass as breathless with satisfaction as if he’s gained some personal vengeance by their success.

“At least a day,” Kuzuhara says, stoic resolution to counter Izaya’s thrumming anticipation. “We should be able to keep the perimeter around them unobserved until tonight and maybe longer; it depends on how paranoid the vampire herself is. It’d be better to bring them in sooner to avoid any risk of losing our prey.”

“Sure,” Izaya says, sounding distracted; Shizuo’s not sure how much of Kuzuhara’s explanation the other heard at all. “Any subclasses?”

“None that we’ve been able to track. There can’t be more than one or two in close proximity or we would have found them.”

“Right.” Izaya lets the pages of the report fall back over themselves, lets the file fall to smack heavily against Kuzuhara’s desk; when he lift his head again his eyes are shining, his mouth dragging up at the corner into a grin sharper by far than any Shizuo has ever seen from him before. “We’ll take it.”

“Hey,” Shizuo says, offering weak protest too late to effect any significant change. “Don’t I get any say in this?”

“No,” Kuzuhara and Izaya say as one. Kuzuhara tips his head towards Izaya, his jaw setting into the beginning of what might be irritation, but Izaya just huffs a laugh and ducks his head into an overblown show of deference. Kuzuhara’s forehead creases, his mouth pulls down at the corners, but he’s looking back to Shizuo anyway, apparently more interested in answering the other’s question than in dressing Izaya down for his casual insubordination. “This is an assignment for you as part of C3. You can think of it as an order; the work of months is depending on your success.”

“Don’t worry, Kuzu-chan,” Izaya chirps, drawing the weight of the director’s attention back to himself again. Shizuo frowns harder; Izaya must be really on-edge, to so casually use the teasing nickname he usually only applies outside of headquarters. “We’re the best team of vampire hunters you have.” He reaches out without looking to weight his hand against Shizuo’s shoulder, his fingers tightening on offhand possessiveness, as if Shizuo’s some kind of weapon for him to wield rather than a rational human being alongside him. Shizuo hisses at the contact, the sound enough to finally draw Izaya’s gaze to him for a moment; but Izaya just looks at him sidelong, his mouth pulling wider on that grin, and he tightens his hold instead of loosening it. Shizuo can feel Izaya’s fingertips digging in hard under his skin. “We’ll go catch your monster for you.”

Kuzuhara reaches up to adjust his sunglasses again. “That’s _Director Kuzuhara_ ,” he tells Izaya, his voice so deliberately level it carries more chill than it would with more emotion. “I’m glad to hear that I can count on you to succeed.”

“Of course, my honored lord,” Izaya drawls, his tone making the title a mockery over his lips. “There’s no one better at taking out monsters than we are.” He sketches a bow, the shape of it so rushed as to be teasing in itself, and when he turns towards the door it’s without letting his hold on Shizuo’s shoulder go. The force of his grip drags Shizuo sideways, sends him stumbling over a step before he can catch himself, and Izaya glances back through his lashes at him, his mouth pulling taut on the same delighted amusement so bright in his gaze. “I bet Shizu-chan could take out a Servamp all by himself, if he put his mind to it.”

“Shut up,” Shizuo growls, offering his darkest scowl for Izaya’s smirk; but Izaya just laughs, and lets his hand slide off Shizuo’s shoulder as he takes the lead out of the director’s office.

Shizuo’s still frowning as he steps through the doorway, but it doesn’t make much of a difference; he still ends up following Izaya anyway.


	3. Humane

“Aren’t you excited for this, Shizu-chan?” Izaya asks as he takes the lead up the flight of stairs at the apartment complex, skipping up two or three at a time so he easily outpaces Shizuo’s more sedate pace and is forced to wait at a landing for the other to catch back up. “This is the best assignment we’ve ever had, I’d think you’d show a little more enthusiasm.”

“It’s just another assignment,” Shizuo tells him, following the other’s lead with the most deliberately slow pace he can manage. “I don’t know why _you’re_ so worked up. Is this your sadism showing through again?”

Izaya laughs, the sound high and bright enough that it echoes off the walls of the stairwell. “I keep telling you, Shizu-chan, it’s not _sadism_. Don’t you care about taking out a dangerous monster and making the world a safer place for everyone you know and love?”

“I’ve never known anyone who got attacked by a vampire except for me,” Shizuo tells him. “And that’s more _your_ fault for not backing me up than the vampire’s. Don’t try to tell me you’re not a sadist.”

“Mm,” Izaya hums, pausing halfway up the next flight of stairs to hang over the railing and grin down at Shizuo. “I never tried to say that in _general_. Just not towards vampires.”

“Oh good.” Shizuo takes the last step onto the landing with force enough to rattle the whole structure as he gives Izaya a flat look. “Glad to know it’s just me you like watching suffer. How the hell did I get stuck with _you_ as my partner?”

“Take it up with Kuzucchi,” Izaya tells him, turning away to continue up the stairs as Shizuo rounds the corner to follow him. “I’m a good little soldier who just does what my commander tells me.”

Shizuo snorts the beginning of a laugh. “Bullshit.” Izaya glances back at him, flashing a smile that sparkles bright behind the dark of his eyes; but they’re nearing their target floor, and he doesn’t respond aloud. He turns away instead, slowing his footfalls to lessen the rattle of the sound against the steps, and Shizuo catches up to him before they reach the door leading into the hallway they’ve been aiming for.

“Are you ready?” Shizuo asks while Izaya is working the key they received from Kuzuhara into the lock of the stairwell door. “You know the usual techniques aren’t going to work on a Servamp.”

“I know,” Izaya says, his head ducked down as he braces a hand at the door to muffle the _thud_ of the mechanism of the lock unlatching. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, Shizu-chan, I’m not going to make monster bait of you so I can claim the hero’s welcome all to myself upon my return.”

Shizuo frowns as Izaya reaches for the handle and pushes the door open. “That’s not reassuring, you know.”

“I know.” Izaya takes a step forward into the hallway, his footsteps falling as whisper-soft as the careful modulation of his voice. “Did you ever consider I might have become attached to working with you? It’d be such a pain to get someone else to behave in such a perfectly predictable fashion, I don’t want to go through the trouble of training a replacement.”

Shizuo snorts. “Thanks,” he says, following Izaya down the hallway as he scans the numbers on the outside of the apartment doors for the one they want. “That sounds a lot more like you.”

“I thought you’d appreciate it.” Izaya’s looking ahead of their current location, his attention fixed on a door some feet down the hallway; he lifts a hand to gesture Shizuo to silence as he points to the door ahead of them. Shizuo can’t make out the details of the number plate yet -- Izaya must have counted the doors down from their current location -- but he nods anyway, making the gesture dramatic enough that Izaya will be able to see it at a glance. He steps in nearer as Izaya continues down the hallway, closing the gap between them as they approach the door; by the time Izaya comes to a stop outside the entrance Shizuo is all but stepping on his heels with the length of his strides. Izaya pauses at the doorframe, braces his fingers against the weight of the door to push very carefully against the support of it before shaking his head in confirmation of a lock. Shizuo reaches out for Izaya’s shoulder, closing his hand on the other to pull him back and away from the door, and Izaya moves with alacrity, ducking his head and sweeping his arm into an overblown invitation for Shizuo to move. Shizuo rolls his eyes at this assumption of dominance -- it’s not as if he’s waiting for Izaya’s permission to act -- and then steps forward, bracing his foot hard at the floor as he swings his fist towards the barrier of the locked door. His knuckles slam into the metal just over the lock, the surface creaking under the force; and then the mechanism inside gives way, the pins of the deadbolt twisting and snapping to the force of his blow, and the door flies open with as much speed as if Shizuo’s fist knocked it off its hinges entirety. It rebounds against the inside of the apartment wall, starts to swing back in towards them, but Izaya is moving before it’s hit, slipping through the entrance and shouting, “ _Don’t move!_ ” in preemptive expectation of a fight. Shizuo shoves the door out of the way, striding into the apartment hard on Izaya’s heels and trying to look everywhere at once to take stock of the surroundings before the potential threats have a chance to react to the unexpected intrusion. The apartment is bright inside, better-lit than Shizuo was expecting and strangely comfortable; there’s a dining table, a neat kitchen, smooth floors underfoot and furnishings expensive enough to look simple. For a moment Shizuo thinks they have the wrong apartment, has the brief, stomach-dropping panic that they’ve broken into an ordinary stranger’s home; and then he sees the pair sitting on the couch, and any possibility of _ordinary_ vanishes from his mind.

The man he recognizes right away. He’s wearing that odd lab coat from the picture, the clothing completely at odds with everything about the domestic setting; he looks perplexed by Izaya and Shizuo’s sudden entrance more than alarmed, is blinking wide-eyed at the ruin Shizuo has left of his front door. But he looks almost normal, or at least _human_ , compared to the woman sitting next to him. The lighting in the room is bright, the glow overhead a gentle gold that turns even the usual unhealthy pallor of Izaya’s skin to some kind of human warmth; but it skims off the woman’s face as if it’s ivory, or ceramic, like she’s some kind of doll instead of a living being. Her mouth looks crimson against the pale of her face, as saturated red as if she’s painted lipstick heavy over the curve of her mouth, and the shocked-open gaze she’s turning on Shizuo and Izaya is catching her eyes into scarlet as bright as her mouth. If there were any question about her humanity, her teeth would give it away; even from across the room Shizuo can see the points of oversized canines threatening her lower lip, the edges of them glinting sharp as razor blades in the light.

“Hello!” It’s the man who speaks, chirping the greeting into the quiet of the room with as much casual cheer as if he didn’t just have his front door broken down by two complete strangers. He has his hands lifted over the back of the couch in an overt gesture of surrender, but the action is completely at odds with the smile flashing as bright as his glasses as he looks from Izaya to Shizuo. “Are you from C3?”

“Yeah,” Shizuo says without thinking. The response gets him a sideways glare from Izaya and a hissing “ _Ssh_ ,” as if their affiliation isn’t perfectly obvious from their very presence here. Shizuo rolls his eyes and continues, more to spite Izaya’s glare than for any other reason. “We’re vampire hunters.”

“Oh!” The man drops his hands to clap together, beaming delight across the space at them, and Izaya takes a step forward, swinging his hand up from his side to offer the edge of an open knife to the man; the Eve, he must be. Shizuo didn’t even see him draw the weapon. The Eve draws his hands away immediately, lifting them back over his head with an apologetic smile as if he’s forgotten to obey some rule in a game. “You’re the ones who have been tracking Celty!” The vampire turns to look at him, her eyes going wider as her mouth comes open on shock, and the Eve looks back to her, the apology in his smile going more sincere as he meets her gaze. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, darling, I just didn’t want to worry you! You always do fret too much about government oversight, and I keep telling you it’s unnecessary!” He looks back to the other two, his gaze skimming over Izaya before settling on Shizuo as apparently the more rational listener of the two. “Celty’s a little bit paranoid when it comes to secret agencies like C3. And aliens, and ghosts; she’s really just surprisingly nervous for a vampire, not at all what I would expect. Are all vampires so jumpy, have you found? I mean it’s not as if I mind!” He drops a hand again, reaching out this time to press against the vampire’s knee and turning a smile on her so warm Shizuo has the vague, uncomfortable feeling of interrupting a private moment. “Celty’s the best thing to have ever happened to me!”

“What is _wrong_ with you.” The words are harsh, grating far back in the speaker’s throat; the tone that results is so rough that Shizuo doesn’t recognize it for a moment as Izaya’s, doesn’t make sense of what he’s hearing until the other flings an arm out to gesture towards the vampire still sitting still on the far end of the couch. “That’s a _monster_. Are you seriously trusting your _life_ to it?”

“I’d trust Celty with a lot more than my life!” The Eve is still smiling, his eyes still bright with that same near-manic delight, but his expression is settling into tension at the very corners of his eyes, as if it’s sinking deeper into his awareness as Izaya pushes back on it. “I love her.”

“You can’t love a monster,” Izaya says at once, the words coming as whip-quick as if he’s reciting back some memorized rebuttal and is in haste to get through the rest of the conversation as rapidly as possible. “You’re delusional. She’s seduced you into being her _pet_.”

“Ha!” The other man laughs, his expression going blissfully warm again. “I don’t think I’d mind. Anything Celty wants to seduce me into I’d be delighted to give her! Usually I’m the one who has to talk _her_ into drinking any of my blood, you know, and even then only on very special occasions.”

“You’re crazy,” Izaya says, his voice going flat and cold in his throat. “You’re completely insane. You’ve seriously convinced yourself you love a _vampire_?”

“I do love Celty,” the Eve says immediately, with no trace of hesitation in his reply. “The hard part was convincing her that _she_ loved _me_.”

“No kidding,” Izaya says in that same icy tone. Shizuo looks sideways at him, feeling the tension of concern starting to press against the line of his shoulders, but Izaya doesn’t look at him; he’s still staring at the Eve, his mouth twisted on distaste and his grip still braced hard at the handle of the knife at his side. Shizuo isn’t completely sure Izaya realizes he’s still holding it. “You’re _food_ to it, that’s the only value you have to those things. You’re ready to lie down and let it kill you just because you’ve talked yourself into believing your own ridiculous love story?”

“I wouldn’t mind if Celty killed me,” the Eve says. His voice is going steadier with every repetition; his gaze is still certain, his mouth still curving on that smile. He still has one hand up over his head; the other is stretched out to weight against the vampire’s knee, over the dark fall of a skirt that looks like it’s made of shadows rather than fabric. “Haven’t you ever been willing to die for something?”

Izaya’s laugh is sharp, so bright and brittle it carries almost no amusement at all. Shizuo’s spine prickles with the beginnings of adrenaline, with the start of half-formed concern enough to keep his focus on his partner next to him instead of on the hypothetical threat of the vampire in front of them. “Don’t you care at all about _living_?” He shakes his head, dismissing the reply the other might give before he hears it; when he lets his knife drop towards the belt at his hip it’s with his movements sharp and jerky on determination and without looking at Shizuo at all. “Come on, Shizu-chan, there’s no point in talking to a lunatic.”

“Wait,” Shizuo says, and reaches out to rest the fingertips of one hand against Izaya’s shoulder. “Hang on, there’s no need to rush.”

Izaya twists away, jerking back from Shizuo’s touch and turning to fix the other with a stare for the first time since they came in the front door. “ _What_?” he snaps. He’s scowling at Shizuo, his eyes dark like the vampire’s uncanny clothing and his smile dropping to the weight of a frown as he stares at the other. “What the _fuck_ , Shizu-chan, we’re in the middle of a _fight_.”

“We’re not fighting right now,” Shizuo tells him, still reaching out over the gap between them in some half-formed thought of pressing his fingers to the strain visible across Izaya’s shoulders. “We’re just talking. There’s no need to--”

“There’s _every_ need,” Izaya lashes back at him. “I can’t believe this, are you seriously buying this whole tragic romance bullshit?” He takes another step back without looking, backing himself just out of range of Shizuo’s reaching fingers; when he huffs an exhale it comes with a twist at his mouth, a violent curve of his lips that doesn’t touch the dark of his eyes at all.

“You _are_ ,” he says, and his shoulders tip back, his chin comes up; for a moment he’s looking down his nose at Shizuo, judgment clear in every line of his expression as he stares at the other. “I should have expected it, I guess. You always have been too soft for your own good.” He looks away from Shizuo, the tilt of his head dismissing the other as if he’s not even there; Shizuo can feel his chest knot on frustration, can feel his breathing sticking rough over the weight of a growl in his throat, but Izaya doesn’t look back at him any more than he glances at the Eve. “I guess I’ll have to do this myself, then.”

He moves quickly. Shizuo is staring right at him, the whole of his attention fixed on the strain building across Izaya’s shoulders, and even then he loses track of him for the first moment of action as the other throws himself forward towards the couch. Shizuo has to blink to clear his awareness, has to turn his head to make sense of the speed of Izaya’s movement, and by the time his vision catches up with the dark of the other’s form Izaya is halfway across the space to the vampire, the open blade he was pressing close to his side upraised in anticipation of a blow. There’s a burst of sound, a pair of shouts from two separate throats, and it’s only as Shizuo throws himself forward to make a grab for Izaya that he realizes one is his own, that he feels the afterimage of “ _Izaya!_ ” tearing raw over the back of his throat. His fingers skim fabric, his hand closes on nothing, and it’s as he takes another step forward that Izaya comes in close enough to actually swing at the Servamp still staring shock up at him. She blinks, turning her head aside in reflexive retreat from the blow, and then her Eve is crashing into her, still halfway through his own yell of her name as he knocks her aside. Izaya’s still swinging, still cutting a path through the air with the sharp edge of the knife in his hand; and then Shizuo gets his arm between Izaya and the other pair, and closes his hand on the other’s shoulder, and stalls Izaya’s forward movement before he can continue.

“ _Izaya_ ,” he says, snapping the consonants with force as if that will make it past Izaya’s focused scowl, as if that will bring the other’s attention back to him. “ _Stop_.”

“Let me go,” Izaya says, twisting hard in a futile attempt to shake off Shizuo’s hold. “Shizu-chan, let me _go_.”

“Put the knife down.”

“ _No_ ,” Izaya snaps, and then he does look up to Shizuo again, his whole expression falling into lines of vicious frustration. “That’s a _monster_ , it needs to be _dealt_ with instead of left free to cause havoc.”

“Celty doesn’t cause havoc!” the Eve protests, his voice skipping high on the force of his insistence.

Izaya ignores him as thoroughly as if the Eve’s not even there, as if he didn’t even hear the words spoken. “Let me go,” he says again, biting the words off as he stares pure fury up at Shizuo. “If you’re too soft-hearted to do it let me go and _I’ll_ take care of it.”

Shizuo shakes his head. “No,” he says again, feeling some of the first rush of adrenaline easing from his shoulders as the immediate threat of violence fades. “She’s different than the others we’ve fought. Can’t we hear them out first?”

Izaya snorts. “Monster,” he says, the word bright with venom, and then he lifts his hand from his side again. Shizuo sees the shine of light off the blade, has a moment of confusion -- Izaya can’t reach the Eve from here, much less the Servamp, there’s no way he can break free of Shizuo’s hold -- and then the knife swings out, the razor edge of the blade catching and tearing through Shizuo’s shirt instead, and in the first sun-bright shock of pain Shizuo can see the flash of Izaya’s teeth in something that looks as much like a grimace as a smile. Shizuo loses his grip on Izaya’s shoulder, his hand lifts reflexively to clutch against the ache spreading over his chest in time with the sudden spill of warm blood over his skin, and Izaya twists away, abandoning Shizuo to return to his initial attempted attack. His hand is still fisted around the handle of the knife at his side, his whole body is leaning forward as he steps back in towards the couch; and Shizuo moves without thinking, without allowing himself the time for anything like conscious thought under his actions. He reaches out for Izaya’s back, bloodstained fingers curling in against his palm as he moves, and at his lips: “ _Izaya-kun_ ” dragging so rough in his throat he barely recognizes the sound of it. Izaya glances back at him for a moment, his head turning away from the tangle of the Eve and the Servamp over the couch; and Shizuo’s fist swings in to hit against Izaya’s temple.

He intended it to be a gentle blow, meant more to shove Izaya aside than actually hurt him; but his strength is too much, or his aim is too good, because he can see Izaya’s expression go slack as the blow lands, can see the other’s arm go heavy as his eyes roll up into the blank of unconsciousness. The knife rattles to the floor, falling free of Izaya’s suddenly nerveless fingers, and Shizuo throws himself forward, hissing frustration with himself even as Izaya collapses bonelessly towards the floor. He doesn’t save him from the fall entirely, but he at least manages to get an arm under the other’s shoulders, which is enough to keep Izaya from another blow to the head as he falls. Shizuo’s left with Izaya’s unconscious form caught in the curve of his arm, and his chest aching from the tear of Izaya’s knife through his skin, and all the adrenaline in his body going cold and chill with the aftereffects of combat.

The room is very quiet for a moment. Shizuo can hear the sound of his own panting-fast breathing, can feel his heart pounding hard enough in his chest that he feels it should be audible too; and then there’s a rustle of fabric, a creak of springs from the couch, and from over the edge of the back, “Did you actually knock him out?” with more interest than alarm on the words.

Shizuo lifts his head. The Eve is leaning over the back of the couch, blinking owlishly from behind his glasses as he looks down at Izaya in Shizuo’s arms; there’s the beginning of a smile playing at his lips, his whole expression leaning closer to intrigue than panic. “That’s pretty impressive. Did you know where to hit him or are you just incredibly strong?”

“What?” Shizuo says, struggling to make sense of how he made it to the point of discussing the partner he just rendered unconscious with the Eve of the Servamp they were meant to bring in.

“You probably gave him a concussion,” the Eve continues without so much as glancing up at Shizuo’s speech. “I hope you have a good medical facility back at C3, being knocked out can be really dangerous. Unless you were actually trying to kill him?”

“What?” Shizuo says again. His fingers tighten involuntarily against Izaya’s arm. “ _No_.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you were,” the Eve says, lifting his head to turn that focused attention on Shizuo’s torn shirt. He lifts a hand to gesture to the bleeding injury over the other’s chest, the movement of his fingers imitating the drag of Izaya’s knife. “He did strike first, after all.”

“Shut up,” Shizuo tells him, feeling strangely defensive over Izaya rendered unconscious and defenseless for this verbal attack by his own too-strong response. “He was just trying to do the job we were sent here for.”

“True,” the Eve says. “I do respect that in the general sense. But I find some flexibility is important to deal with the shifting demands of existence; not everything turns out the way you expect it to!” He blinks his attention back to Shizuo’s face, tips his head to the side as he considers the other. “So what are _you_ going to do now?”

Shizuo blinks. He feels out of his depth, overwhelmed by events and distracted by the sound of his own heart pounding in his chest. “What are you talking about?”

“Your partner--” the Eve ducks his head to gesture to Izaya, “--was all ready to kill us.” He pauses, lifts a shoulder in a careless shrug. “Or to break Celty’s contract symbol, which I guess is the closest you can get. Your organization does experiments on vampires, right?”

Shizuo shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“Hm.” The Eve turns his head to the side to rest against the edge of the couch. “I guess you wouldn’t. They probably wouldn’t send a researcher out into the field like this.” He looks back down to Izaya again, his attention skipping without any trace of hesitation. “Do you want to finish the job you were sent here to do? I admit I’m not very useful when it comes to combat, but you should know Celty can become a goddess of destruction, beautiful and terrible to behold!” He looks back to Shizuo. “But you could probably defeat her, or at least break her phone. It would have been easier with your partner to work with, though. Is there a possibility that the ardor of our love has persuaded yet another agent of a menacing organization to sympathize with our plight?”

“You’re in love,” Shizuo says. “With a vampire?”

“ _We’re_ in love,” the Eve corrects him. “It was just me by myself for a long time, but now Celty has come around to binding herself to me as well!” He lifts a hand to pull at the collar of his coat and draw it back from the side of his neck; there’s a pair of bruises there, two pinpoint divots in the skin perfectly spaced to fit the sharp teeth of the woman still peering nervously over the edge of the couch at Shizuo. “This is the only marriage vow I need!”

Shizuo blinks again. The bite mark is less gruesome than he expected it to be; from the few feet of distance it’s hard to see at all. He doesn’t think he would have noticed it were it not for the other’s comment. “You let her drink your blood?”

“Of course.” The Eve lets his coat fall back into place to blink back down at Shizuo still kneeling on the floor. “She has to get blood from somewhere, and Celty’s too kind-hearted to take from anyone who doesn’t offer it willingly.” He looks back to the vampire again, his face glowing once more with the sunshine bright that he seems to offer anytime he looks at his companion. “She’s more humane than most humans I’ve met!”

Shizuo stares at them for a moment: the Eve, beaming affectionate warmth at the vampire in front of him, the whole of his body and attention turned in to focus on her, the vampire with her head ducked down as if to hide her features but her gaze fixed on him as surely as his is on her. Her arm is angled forward; Shizuo is sure without looking that their fingers are linked in the shadow of dark fabric that makes up the vampire’s skirt.

“You should get out of here,” he says finally, ducking his head to look at Izaya’s still form while he pulls the other into a better angle against the support of his aching chest so he can stand up. “C3 knows you’re located here, and if they don’t send us back in it’ll be someone else who comes after you.”

“Of course!” The Eve sounds utterly unfazed by this statement, almost amused by Shizuo’s assumption of the necessity of giving the suggestion voice. “It’s not like we can stay here with the door like it is, anyway.”

“Right.” Shizuo gets to his feet, bracing Izaya’s slack weight against his shoulder as he does. “Sorry about that.”

“No need to apologize,” the Eve tells him. “You helped us out a lot, really. If it were up to your partner I think Celty would be en route to all manner of experimentation even now!” He’s smiling up at Shizuo again, his attention diverted however briefly from the woman in front of him; there’s no trace of sarcasm in his expression or tone. Shizuo doesn’t think he’s ever seen anyone so sincere in all his life. “I hope your partner’s okay!”

Shizuo huffs. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I’m with you there.” The vampire shifts on the couch, disentangling her hand from the other’s as she moves to lean over the high back of the furniture; for a moment the drape of her clothing gives the impression that a shadow has taken up residence over the upholstery, that the light overhead is simply failing to penetrate to this area of the room. Then she sits back up, shaking auburn hair back from her face, and silently offers Izaya’s dropped knife, now with the blade closed safely away inside the handle. Shizuo can feel his shoulders tense as he looks at the knife, can feel the clotting injury down the front of his chest ache as if the reminder of Izaya’s action is enough to set his nerve endings alight again. But Izaya’s unconscious at his shoulder, a bruise rising at his temple from the weight of Shizuo’s blow, so: “Thanks,” he says, and reaches out to take the weapon back from the vampire. “I’ll make sure he gets it when he comes to.” The vampire ducks her head, offering a nod of understanding without giving voice to words, and Shizuo smiles without having to think about it at all.

“Good luck!” the Eve chirps, lifting his hand over his head in an exuberant wave as Shizuo turns to make his way back towards the destroyed door. “ And thank you!” Shizuo huffs an exhale instead of giving a direct answer, and doesn’t turn around, and by the time he’s heading back down the hall to the stairwell he’s forgotten all about the Eve’s excessively cheerful disposition.

He’s just made some much bigger problems for himself to worry about.


	4. Judgment

“So.” Director Kuzuhara crosses his arms over his chest and leans back hard against the bookshelf behind him. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Shizuo stares back at him. There’s nothing else worth looking at in the room; the books are a distraction insufficient to hold his attention, and Kuzuhara’s focus on his face makes the other the most likely candidate for his gaze. There’s the possibility of Izaya standing next to him, of course; but Izaya is staring straight ahead with the same fixed focus he’s had since Shizuo came into Kuzuhara’s office, and Shizuo thinks it might actually be harder to look at Izaya so pointedly _not_ looking at him than to meet the mirrored shine of Kuzuhara’s sunglasses on the other side of the table. The stitches holding the injury across his chest closed ache. He wishes he had had enough time for the pain meds to take effect. “Not really.”

“You realize the implications of your actions,” Kuzuhara says. “I sent the both of you out as a team to bring in the first Servamp we’ve been able to track to ground in years, and you come back with neither the Servamp nor the Eve. I don’t particularly care whether the two of you get along or not, but until now you’ve been able to keep your bickering to a manageable level that didn’t affect your undeniable success.” He tips his head down to look at the documents in front of him; the medical reports, Shizuo thinks, though he can’t be sure from the angle he’s standing at. There’s the sheen of an x-ray pinned to one of the document’s; that one is Izaya’s, Shizuo is at least sure of that much. The reminder of the damage his unthinking blow did to the other makes him cringe more than the ache under his newly-changed shirt; he looks away from the file and back up to Kuzuhara again.

“Orihara allowing himself to be distracted from the mission by your provocation is one thing,” he goes on, still looking at the documents in front of him. “Your decision is something else again, Heiwajima.” His head comes up, those mirrored lenses aim at Shizuo again; Shizuo meets them head-on, holding to as much composure as he can find. He can see his reflection distorted and shrunk in the reflection of the lenses. “If your personal investment is preventing you from doing your job you’ll find yourself out of one entirely.”

“It’s not personal investment,” Shizuo tries to protest. “You didn’t see them. Her Eve was doting on her, and she--”

“She is a vampire,” Kuzuhara intones. “A powerful one. She holds the ability to create an army of subclasses if she so chooses. The fact that she hasn’t done so yet does not dictate what she may or may not do in the future.”

Shizuo sets his jaw. “They were in love.” That gets a snort from next to him, a huff of air gusting hard from Izaya’s chest, but when Shizuo looks sideways to scowl at the other Izaya isn’t looking at him, his expression hasn’t so much as shifted from his original fixed stare. “They were _happy_ together.”

“Maybe,” Kuzuhara says, sounding highly skeptical of the very premise of happiness. He leans forward over the desk, bracing a hand against the support and reaching up to adjust his sunglasses with the other. “And what if something were to happen to her beloved Eve? The Servamp might be docile enough now, but there’s no way to predict how far her own morals will hold if she loses her current tie to humanity. The emotional backlash might leave her even less controllable than she was to begin with.”

Shizuo doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing he can say. His chest is still aching from the drag of Izaya’s knife edge through his skin, Kuzuhara’s voice is set and solid as a brick wall; and beside him Izaya is acting like he’s not even here, as if Shizuo’s entire existence has ceased to register in his awareness of the world. There’s a pause, a moment while Kuzuhara’s sunglasses throw light back into Shizuo’s eyes; and then:

“You’re on probation,” he declares, turning his head down as he flips one of the open files on his table shut. “Take a week’s time off to cool your head. I’ll see if I can find you some work in the research labs after that.” He looks back up, turning his attention on Izaya. “As for you, Orihara--”

“I would like to formally request reassignment to a new field partner, Director Kuzuhara,” Izaya says, his voice precise and clipping off every word as if with a knife edge. Shizuo shouldn’t feel the words so much like a blow against his aching chest as he does, shouldn’t flinch from the cool distance of Izaya’s tone. He does anyway.

Kuzuhara looks at Izaya for a long moment. His expression is as unreadable as the line of his mouth. “I’m told you ought to take some time to ensure a complete recovery from your injuries.”

“I’m fine.” He’s not fine -- Shizuo can see the proof of it in the deliberately slack angle of Izaya’s shoulders, the intentional relaxation in the curve of his hands; Izaya never looks so relaxed except when he’s making a show of it -- but his voice is still perfectly steady, perhaps even very slightly amused at the idea that he might need longer to recover. “Of course, I’m happy to spend as long under supervision as you would like to keep me, but I’m anxious to reestablish my value to C3 after the failure of the last mission I was assigned to.”

“Jesus,” Shizuo hisses. “It was this _morning_ , don’t act like--”

“It would be beneficial to have another partner,” Izaya says, speaking louder to cut off Shizuo’s words. The increase in his volume is the only sign he gives of having heard Shizuo at all. “But I’m happy to work solo until a suitable replacement can be found.” Shizuo hisses, giving wordless rejection to the assumed calm of Izaya’s statement, but neither Izaya nor Kuzuhara looks at him.

There’s another pause, a moment of Kuzuhara gazing at Izaya and Izaya staring right back into the glimmer of his reflection in the director’s sunglasses. Then Kuzuhara takes a breath, and sighs an exhale, and some of the tension across his shoulders eases into the weight of decision.

“No,” Shizuo says, growling over the word before Kuzuhara has even opened his mouth to speak. “You _can’t_.”

“I’ll pull a mission for you,” Kuzuhara says, giving the concession to Izaya without looking at Shizuo, even when the other hisses frustrated rejection of this decision. “Stay the night in the medical ward for monitoring and return in the morning for debriefing.”

“I will,” Izaya says, and then he does what Shizuo has never seen him do before and actually offers a bow to the man on the other side of the desk. “Thank you, Director.”

“Medical ward,” Kuzuhara tells him, lifting a hand to point to the door. He waits until Izaya has turned and is pulling the office door open; only then does he turn that silvery focus back on Shizuo. “And probation for you.”

Shizuo can feel his jaw ache with how tightly he’s clenching it, is sure the strain is clear in the whole of his expression. But Kuzuhara is still considering him, still has his focus on Shizuo’s face, and if he’s honest with himself Shizuo doesn’t know that he could have expected anything else.

“Yes,” he says, ducking his head to capitulation with far less grace than Izaya showed. “Sir.” And he’s turning on his heel without waiting to be dismissed, moving towards the door while it’s still swinging shut in Izaya’s wake.

He’s unlikely to make any headway arguing with Kuzuhara, and if he doesn’t catch Izaya now, he doesn’t know when he’ll next have the chance.


	5. Done

It takes Shizuo longer than it should to catch up to Izaya. He’s only a handful of steps behind the other, only a few seconds slower in leaving Kuzuhara’s office; but Izaya is walking fast, maybe even ran over the few seconds he was out of sight, because by the time Shizuo comes out of the office and into the hallway to look for him Izaya is halfway towards the entrance to headquarters, his shoulders deliberately straight and his footsteps carrying him farther away with every move he makes.

“Izaya!” Shizuo calls, yelling before he can think through if it’s a good idea to let Izaya know he’s looking for him; but Izaya doesn’t so much as flinch at the sound, and certainly neither slows nor turns his head to look back. He just keeps moving away as steadily as if Shizuo hadn’t shouted for him at all, as if Shizuo doesn’t even exist, and Shizuo can feel the grating edge of irritation at being so thoroughly ignored rise to press hard against the inside of his injured chest.

“ _Hey_ ,” he shouts again, “ _Izaya_ ” but he’s moving too, suiting motion to words to jog down the hallway after the other’s retreating form. He half-expects Izaya to take off into a run before he catches up; but the other just keeps walking, his measured pace fast but unchanging even as Shizuo closes the gap between them. “Izaya, wait.” Izaya doesn’t turn; Shizuo falls into pace just over his shoulder, scowling hard at the back of Izaya’s head. “Are you just planning to ignore me forever?”

“I don’t have any reason to do otherwise,” Izaya says without looking back. His voice is flat in the back of his throat; Shizuo almost doesn’t recognize the sound of it without the usual lilting heights of amusement Izaya usually adds to his speech. “It’s not like you’re anything special to me.”

“We’re _partners_ ,” Shizuo growls.

“We are not,” Izaya corrects him instantly. “I’m a solo agent until I have a new team assigned to me.”

Shizuo hisses incoherent frustration. “We’ve _been_ partners,” he corrects, backtracking over his words to fit them into an accuracy even Izaya can’t dispute. “For _years_. You can’t suddenly act like we’re strangers just because of one failed mission.”

“I can,” Izaya says, still without looking around or offering the least inflection for his tone. “You were singlehandedly responsible for the collapse of the biggest mission we’d been assigned, I’d prefer to distance myself from your failure as much as possible.”

“ _Singlehandedly_ ,” Shizuo repeats, his voice creaking over the beginnings of true anger in his throat. “You _attacked_ me, don’t you think you bear at least some of the blame?”

“You demonstrated yourself unwilling to complete the task at hand,” Izaya says. “I took the steps necessary to pursue success.”

“At the expense of our teamwork,” Shizuo growls. He’s still staring at the back of Izaya’s head, the smooth dark of the other’s hair giving him no traction at all for the other’s thoughts; even the blank stare he saw in Kuzuhara’s office would be better than this. “Stop _walking_ , we need to talk about this.”

Izaya’s shoulders shift under the fall of his shirt. “I don’t have anything to talk about with a traitor.”

“Fuck _you_ ,” Shizuo snaps, and reaches out to grab at Izaya’s shirt. “Stop running away and _talk_ to me.” His fingers close around Izaya’s shoulder, he pulls hard, and Izaya loses his footing entirely, stumbling backwards and sideways as he flails through an attempt to catch his balance. Shizuo flinches, opens his mouth to offer an apology; but then Izaya looks back and up at him, and his eyes are so dark with loathing that Shizuo’s apology dies on his lips unvoiced.

“Resorting to physical force again?” Izaya asks, and his voice isn’t flat at all, now, there’s heat crackling all along the knife-edge sharp of it as he spits words like blows at Shizuo’s face. “I don’t know what else I expected, it’s not like an animal like you could be expected to use anything like rational methods of communication.”

Shizuo drops his hold on Izaya’s shoulder as if he’s been burned. “You weren’t _listening_ to me. I tried talking first.”

“Of course,” Izaya snaps. “You’re willing to talk until things don’t go your way, and _then_ you try to murder your partner in the middle of a mission. Yes, you’re very rational and thoughtful, Shizu-chan.”

“I wasn’t trying to _murder_ you,” Shizuo bites back. “You _stabbed_ me, I was _bleeding_. I was trying to stop you from hurting me _more_ , it was self-defense.”

“Naturally,” Izaya says. “Self-defense, sure, that’s why I went in for x-rays to make sure my skull wasn’t cracked. You’re not a danger at _all_.”

“Shut _up_ ,” Shizuo growls. “You came at me with a _knife_. We’re partners, we’re supposed to work _together_.”

“ _We’re not partners_ ,” Izaya says, cutting off each word into broken-glass clarity. “I’m _not working with you_.”

Shizuo huffs in a completely futile attempt to ease his rising frustration. “You _were_. When you _cut_ me. We were working _together_ , I was _trusting_ you.”

“You were sympathizing with a _monster_ ,” Izaya snaps back. “We stopped being partners the minute you became a turncoat.”

“All I wanted to do was give them a minute to explain.” Shizuo’s heart is pounding, his whole body thrumming with adrenaline as if he’s in the middle of a fight; except there’s no vampire here, no enemy caught between the two of them, just that hardness behind Izaya’s eyes and the fixed set of Izaya’s mouth refusing to give way by so much as an inch. “I wasn’t saying we should let them go, just that we heard them out.”

“There’s nothing to hear out,” Izaya tells him. “They’re not _human_.”

“The Eve is!”

“He threw in with the monsters when he decided to let his _Servamp_ keep him as a pet.” Izaya’s tone turns the title into a mockery, drags it rough over the anger in the back of his throat. He’s glaring up at Shizuo through the dark of his lashes, his mouth set so hard it’s almost trembling. “Just like _you_ did when you decided to ‘hear them out.’”

“I wanted to give them a _chance_ ,” Shizuo growls. “Why were you so afraid to give them a minute to plead their case?”

“There’s no case to be made,” Izaya tells him. “Monsters are a threat to humanity and they have to be dealt with, no matter how completely they’re able to wrap people around their fingers. Is _that_ what happened to you? What, was it your _type_?”

“What are you _talking_ about?” Shizuo demands. “Nothing _happened_ to me, I just wanted five minutes to figure out what was going on!”

“We could have been _done_ in five minutes if you had done your job instead of trying to kill me.” Izaya’s snapping the words off against his teeth, his mouth pulling hard over the sharp edges of the sounds. “You ruined our mission and you ruined my record.”

Shizuo can feel his shoulders stiffen. “And your record is all you care about? You really never gave a damn about our partnership, is that it?”

“No,” Izaya tells him. “You were a convenient tool for me to use, Shizu-chan. If you’re not going to do what you’re supposed to you’re useless to me.” He takes a step away, tipping his chin up so he’s looking down his nose at Shizuo, so the whole of his expression goes haughty and distant even before he’s increased the distance between them. “Do what you want. Kuzuhara might be more forgiving, but _I_ don’t associate with monsters.”

“I’m _not_ \--” Shizuo starts, but Izaya’s turning without waiting for a response, striding away with such speed that by the time Shizuo realizes he’s moving he’s halfway around the corner. “Wait. _Izaya_.” He growls far in the back of his throat, giving voice to the frustration hot in his veins as he lunges forward towards the hallway Izaya turned down. “I’m not _done_ with you!” But the hallway is empty when he rounds the corner, silent and barren of any sign of life at all; Izaya must have ducked into one of the doorways along it, and Shizuo has no way of knowing which one. He glares at the walls, thinks about working his way down the hallway with shouts and kicked-open locks; but he’ll interrupt a lot more people than Izaya that way, and there’s no way he can be sure the other won’t manage to slip away completely in the fuss. Shizuo frowns at the hallway, turning over ideas in his head and discarding them as rapidly; and then he hisses frustration, and turns on his heel to leave the headquarters and pace out his irritation over the city pavement instead of through the cramped space of the C3 hallways.

He tries not to think about how quiet the city seems without his usual shadow alongside him.


	6. Turn

Shizuo isn’t supposed to be going out on missions. His probation is scheduled to last another few days, intended to hold him at home while giving him sufficient time to think over and regret the consequences of his actions during his last assignment. He doubts Kuzuhara intends to give him another mission any time soon, if ever, and even if he does eventually get one again he’s sure it won’t be with Izaya. Izaya hasn’t spoken to him, in spite of multiple attempts on Shizuo’s part to contact him, in person and over the phone and even via a note, once, that he dropped off at Izaya’s mailbox when the other refused to open his door to the persistent attempts Shizuo made at the bell. Shizuo suspects Izaya has ignored the note as much as the voicemails Shizuo has left for him, and he’s certain without needing to be told that Izaya is taking nothing like the recovery time he needs before going out on his next assignment. He’s always been terrible at letting himself heal, Shizuo knows from too-much too-close experience; without Shizuo there to see through his act of health he’s bound to be out on the streets again while he’s still suffering from the aftereffects of his concussion. It’s not Shizuo’s problem, he tells himself, it’s not his job anymore to make sure Izaya is fit for the missions he takes on; but it _is_ his fault, in the end, both Izaya’s injury and Izaya’s current lack of a partner, and no matter what he tells himself when he goes out to wander the city he knows in his heart what he’s looking for.

It’s easy to pick up Izaya’s trail. There’s a sort of smell that follows him, that leaves a mark against the city air that Shizuo can all but follow blindfolded. Smell isn’t quite the right word; it’s more of a feeling, almost, like a path of electricity Shizuo can feel humming over his skin to steer him in the other’s direction. It’s always been there, Shizuo has felt it ever since Director Kuzuhara opened the door to his office to let in the dark eyes and razor smile assigned to be his partner for the foreseeable future. He used to find it uncanny, spent the first few months of assignments jumpy and irritable with everything Izaya said or did; but then it became something of a comfort, a way for Shizuo to have the reassuring certainty of Izaya’s presence even when the other is going unseen, and he stopped wondering why and just accepted the existence of it as a fact. It’s been an almost-constant companion to him for years, now; following the trace of it down shadowy alleys and across deserted intersections is almost a comfort, almost makes Shizuo feel like himself again even with the weight of his probation hanging heavy in the back of his thoughts. He follows it without thinking, without putting any real thought into what he’s doing; it’s only when he hears a laugh that he blinks himself into self-awareness, only as he pauses to look around that he realizes how far from the main part of the city he’s come. He’s wandered miles from the bright lights of the downtown he intended to walk through, strayed into the parts of town left unlit both literally and figuratively, until there’s only the glow of the moon overhead to grant illumination to the dark-empty warehouses rising towards the night sky.

Shizuo never meant to come this far. It’s one thing to idly wander through the city in case he runs into Izaya in the middle of a mission and can lend serendipitous support at an opportune moment; this is something else again, in the dark corners of town where none but gangs and those creatures C3 hunts linger. There’s no excuse for his presence here, no reason for him to be around except to follow Izaya on his first solo mission since they met, and Shizuo might be worried but even he knows better than to admit to following Izaya through the streets of the city when he’s meant to be at home waiting for his reassignment. He takes a step back, ready to turn and leave Izaya to whatever his latest mission may result in; and then there’s that laugh again, bright and high and crystalline, and something cold runs down Shizuo’s spine like a premonition of danger he can’t quite make sense of. He hesitates, frowning unseen into the dark around him; and then there’s a shout, a rising note of panic, and realization hits him like ice lancing into his veins. He’s moving before he can think, kicking forward into a full-on run before he can make up his mind to act, because that shout was Izaya’s but the laugh _wasn’t_ , and Shizuo’s never known Izaya to be too panicked to laugh.

He’s farther away than he thought he was. He rounds one corner, bolts towards the next, and he’s shouting, giving voice to full-throated panic enough to telegraph his location to whatever enemies there may be as clearly as it will to Izaya. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t even think about it. He’s just shouting, “ _Izaya!_ ” breaking free from the tension of concern in his chest like it’s some wild animal snapping free of a chain, and his hands are fists at his sides and his arms are flexing on anticipation of a fight, and then he turns a corner and there they are.

There’s only two figures there. That’s a surprise to Shizuo; he would have sworn Izaya could take on at least a single subclass alone, even injured, could likely hold his own against two or three at least long enough to stage a retreat. But Izaya’s backed up against the wall of one of the darkened warehouses, his jaw set and face bloodless, and he has a stake upraised in one hand but it looks like a desperate defense rather than the threat of certain death it has always seemed before. There’s a shadowy figure stalking towards him, pacing out each step slowly as if it’s a predator approaching some already-beaten prey, and Shizuo’s heart clenches in his chest, his breathing failing him so he can’t even manage a shout for a moment. Izaya lifts the stake higher, gesturing with it as he shouts something too distant for Shizuo to parse, and it’s just as the attacker steps into range that Shizuo is able to struggle into a breath and shout “ _Hey!_ ” with enough force to crack over the space between himself and the other two. Izaya’s head turns, his gaze shifting from the figure in front of him to Shizuo some feet away; Shizuo can see his eyes widen, can see his mouth come open on something too slow or too soft for Shizuo to hear. And in front of him, on top of him, the figure reaches out to shove the stake aside, and grabs Izaya’s head between his hands, and wrenches so sharply to the side that Shizuo can hear the _crack_ of Izaya’s neck snapping even from the distance he’s at.

Shizuo doesn’t mean to scream. The “ _No!_ ” that tears out of his throat is something all its own, a rejection of reality so immediate and visceral that it pulls out of him like it has a lifeforce of its own. It steals his breath, drags long and desperate on all the air in his lungs, as if if he yells loud enough and long enough Izaya won’t go limp against the side of the warehouse, won’t collapse as bonelessly as a dropped doll to the pavement beneath him. Shizuo is stumbling, sprinting, moving so fast he thinks he would trip and fall except that he’s throwing himself forward before he has time to hit the ground, but the attacker is closer, it’s crouching down to cast Izaya’s still form in its shadow while Shizuo is still feet away. It bends in closer, a hand reaching out for Izaya’s face, and “ _Get away from him_ ” Shizuo growls with a force he didn’t know he had, with breath he didn’t know he was master of, as he reaches out to swing the full force of his punch against the attacker’s shoulder. His knuckles land, the jolt hitting hard enough that he can feel it shudder up his arm and stall out at his shoulder; but the other is moving away fast, faster than Shizuo’s even seen anyone or anything move, so quickly his eyes can’t track the motion. There’s a flash of brilliant white teeth, the glow of crimson eyes against the dark of the night; and then the thing is gone, vanished into the shadows of any of a dozen buildings and impossible for Shizuo to track. He might be able to catch up, maybe, if he moves instantly and if he’s lucky enough; but the threat is gone, for the moment at least, and he’s forgetting all about the attacker as he turns, as all his focus centers with painful force on Izaya in front of him.

Izaya’s very still. Shizuo’s heart is hammering in his chest, rattling on panic that he can’t stand to make space for; if he stays calm this can’t be true, there will be some kind of miracle, this will all turn out to be an awful joke on Izaya’s part. But Izaya’s eyes are blank and staring, his face utterly bloodless except for a smear of red against his mouth, and when Shizuo reaches out to touch his shoulder his body shifts without any resistance, tipping back to sprawl over the pavement under him at the barest whisper of a touch.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, speaking the words without feeling them in his chest, pushing them past lips gone numb with horror. “Izaya, fuck, this isn’t funny.” He presses his hand to Izaya’s throat, shoving roughly past the soft lining of the other’s coat and down against the pale curve of his neck; but he can’t find any motion there, can’t find any trace of a heartbeat to thud comfort against his fingers. His hands are starting to shake. He can’t make them stop. “Izaya, wake _up_ , you can’t be dead, you’re my partner.” He clutches at Izaya’s jacket, his fingers curling in hard against the fabric as he pulls in some half-formed thought of shaking Izaya back to consciousness, of forcing awareness back into the flat dark of those unseeing eyes; Shizuo’s vision is blurring, his breathing is catching on the tension in his throat. Under his palm Izaya’s skin is going cold. “ _Izaya_.” Shizuo can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t think; his hand is sliding around to the cradle the back of Izaya’s head, he’s pulling the unresisting weight of the other’s still form in against his chest as he gasps for air that seems to have suddenly evaporated from the space around him. Izaya feels heavier than Shizuo expects him to, with the full weight of his body pressing against the other’s hold; even against Shizuo’s shoulder the burden feels immeasurable, as if the slack press of Izaya against him is enough to overbear the inhuman strength that rests in Shizuo’s muscles and bones. Shizuo’s fingers press against the back of Izaya’s head, Shizuo’s head fits against the curve of Izaya’s neck and shoulder, and when he gasps a breath he can taste that electric shiver prickling over his tongue, can feel his chest clenching around the heat of Izaya’s skin as if to hold to this fading proof of the other’s existence. “Izaya, _fuck_ , Izaya _wake up_.”

Shizuo thinks, at first, it’s his own imagination inventing movement where there is none, where there can be none. His hands are shaking with helpless force where he’s clinging to Izaya’s hair as if to hold the other to life by his own strength and will; it must be that that makes him think Izaya shifts against him, that suggests the drag of fabric pulling with the motion of the form underneath it. Izaya’s skin is cold to the touch, his chest still against Shizuo’s; there’s no way the blur of tears in Shizuo’s eyes can hide the flutter of a nonexistent pulse at the line of Izaya’s throat. But then an arm moves, fingers come up to touch against Shizuo’s shirt, and Shizuo gasps a choked-off inhale of disbelieving hope as Izaya’s hand presses unmistakably against his waist.

“Shizu-chan,” a voice manages, and that’s Izaya’s voice too, familiar even soft on confusion as it is. “What are you doing here?”

“Izaya?” Shizuo pulls away by an inch, blinking hard in a desperate attempt to find evidence for this impossibility, to fit the structure of reality around this implausible event. Izaya’s face is still bloodless, his skin still chill to the touch of Shizuo’s fingers at his throat, jaw, cheek; but he’s blinking up at Shizuo, his eyes bright and focused in place of that awful blankness they had before. “Oh my god, Izaya, you’re alive.”

Izaya blinks at him. “Are you crying?” he asks, and lifts his hand from Shizuo’s waist to touch the wet at the other’s face instead. His lips curve up at one corner, amusement tugging hard at the corner of his mouth. “I never thought I’d get to see you crying over me.”

“I thought you were--” Shizuo starts before his throat closes up as if to stop the words before they can make it to the legitimacy of sound. “I have to get you back to headquarters, you need a hospital.”

“I’m fine,” Izaya tells him. There’s still red at his mouth, still that smear of shadow-dark crimson staining his lips; he drops his hand from Shizuo’s cheek, pressing the back of his wrist to his mouth to wipe at the damp as he lifts his head with no indication whatsoever of the injury that dropped him so horrifyingly still and motionless to the ground. Shizuo lets his hold on the other go, feeling his forehead crease in confusion -- he knows what he saw, his memory is all too clear on that point -- but Izaya is sitting up completely unassisted, bracing a hand at the ground next to him as he ducks his head to scrub at his mouth. His hair falls forward over his features, the dark of the strands making a curtain in front of the brilliant color of his eyes. “What the hell is this?” He pulls his hand away to frown at the stain smeared across the pale of his skin, opens his mouth to lick at the corner of his lips. “Syrup?”

Shizuo doesn’t know what it is that brings everything into clarity for him. Maybe it’s the way Izaya’s mouth is still startlingly crimson even as he licks it clean, his lips showing up in stark relief to the uncanny pale of his skin. Maybe it’s the bright of his eyes, the color so radiant behind the dark of his lashes that Shizuo identifies it as red even in the monochrome illumination of the moonlight. Maybe it’s his inexplicable recovery, Shizuo’s awareness refusing to let go of the horrible certainty he felt when he saw Izaya fall, when he pressed his hands to cold skin and found no trace of a pulse, no sign of a heartbeat to move warm blood through those fast-chilling veins.

“It’s not syrup,” Shizuo says, offering the words without looking away from the part of Izaya’s mouth, from the pristine white of canines gone subtly sharper, slightly larger so they press close against the soft of the other’s lower lip. Shizuo can feel a prickle run down his spine, realization icy enough to shiver a premonition over him as cold as he’s sure Izaya’s skin would be to the touch even now, to freeze him as still as he’s sure the other’s heart is inside the span of his chest. “It’s blood.”

Izaya goes still with his hand halfway to his mouth, with his lips parted on the idle intent to lick the smear of shadowy wet off the back of his wrist. There’s a pause, a moment of complete silence with only the sound of Shizuo’s breathing to fill it; and then Izaya lifts his head, his eyes coming up to focus on Shizuo’s, and the moonlight catches the whole of his expression into stunning, incandescent, immortal perfection.

He would be breathtakingly beautiful, Shizuo thinks, if he didn’t look so horrified.


	7. Trust

“You have to kill me.”

Izaya’s been repeating himself for minutes. He shoved away from Shizuo with the first rush of strength, knocking the other backwards as he recoiled against the side of the building as if it were Shizuo who has become what Izaya has always insisted were monsters. His first words were a whisper, the next a shout; now he’s been reduced to statements, cold, harsh words as if he’s talking about something else other than his own continued existence in the world.

“ _No_ ,” Shizuo says, feeling the word going brittle on his tongue with his own desperate repetitions. “Stop _saying_ that, I’m not going to _kill_ you.”

“You have to,” Izaya repeats. He slides his foot sideways to kick at the belt he threw towards Shizuo with that first shouted command; it slides inches closer to the other, one of the stakes falling loose to roll over the pavement, and Izaya draws his foot back in towards himself as if to keep himself as contained as possible. “It’s your duty, your whole job is to rid the world of monsters like this.”

“I don’t kill vampires,” Shizuo snaps. “I just bring them in to headquarters. I’ve never killed a vampire and I’m _definitely_ not going to kill you.”

“It would be easy,” Izaya tells him, his voice fraying on the words, skidding like he’s trying to aim for cheer and just coming out at mania. “I won’t fight back. I’ll just stay still and let you stake me so you can open my veins and let me bleed out.” He reaches for the collar of his shirt, hooking his fingers into the neckline to drag the fabric down across his chest. “I’ll tell you how to do it.” He slides his foot out again and kicks at the end of the stake to roll it closer towards Shizuo. “All you have to do is hold it.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Shizuo spits, reaching to grab at the stake and pull it away from Izaya’s foot. Izaya’s face relaxes for a moment, his mouth comes open on a gasp of relief; and then Shizuo snaps his arm out to fling the stake away, and relief collapses into misery, Izaya’s mouth twisting on as much agony as if Shizuo really had leaned forward to run the sharpened point through his chest. “ _Stop_ it. Are you _crazy_? You’re my _partner_ , I’m not going to hurt you.”

Izaya’s throat works for a moment, his lashes dipping hard like he’s trying to fight back tears. “Fine,” he says, and lets his hand fall from his shirt so the collar slides back around his neck. “I’ll do it myself” and he’s reaching for his pocket while Shizuo is still gaping protest.

“ _No!_ ” Shizuo snaps, and he’s lunging forward to seize Izaya’s wrist as the other draws the knife out of his pocket, grabbing at the other’s shoulder to hold him against the wall at his back so he can’t maneuver himself loose. Izaya kicks at his calf, struggling hard against Shizuo’s grip on him, and for a brief moment Shizuo can feel the other offering true resistance, his newly developed strength nearly a match for Shizuo’s own. But then Shizuo gets his knee over Izaya’s leg to pin the other still, and shoves harder to knock Izaya back against the wall, and this time when Izaya struggles Shizuo can feel the futility in it even before Izaya hisses up at him.

“I always knew you could take on a subclass at full strength,” he bites off. “You really are no better than a monster yourself.”

“Drop it,” Shizuo tells him. Izaya twists his wrist in Shizuo’s hold, straining to get traction against the other’s grip, and Shizuo tightens his fingers hard, shifting his thumb to dig pressure in against the tendons of Izaya’s wrist. “ _Drop it_.” Izaya strains against his hold, a last desperate attempt to break free of Shizuo’s strength; and then Shizuo shoves against him, digging his thumb as hard against Izaya’s tendon as he can, and Izaya’s hand goes slack with his first hiss of pained reaction. The knife clatters to the ground, sliding a few inches away, and Shizuo breathes a sigh of relief even as Izaya’s gaze drops to cling to the blade with an expression of open longing.

“Okay,” Shizuo says, easing the pressure against Izaya’s wrist back from the point of pain but without loosening his hold on the other’s arm. “Let’s talk about this.”

“Talk about _what_?” Izaya says, lifting his gaze from the knife to fix Shizuo with his attention instead. His eyes are brilliant in the shadows around them; they glow faintly, Shizuo can see from this close-up, like they’re swallowing the bright of the moonlight and throwing it back in the form of their own internal illumination. His lashes look darker in comparison. “I’m a _monster_ , Shizu-chan, the best thing you can do for me is to end this pathetic excuse of life and let me _die_.”

“You’re still _you_ ,” Shizuo snaps. “You’re _not_ a monster, you’re yourself.”

“I’m not _human_ ,” Izaya spits at him. “I could tear your throat out with my _teeth_ to drink your blood and you think I’m _myself_?”

Shizuo lifts a shoulder into a shrug. “It’s not all that different from before,” he says, attempting an amused tone, but Izaya just sets his jaw on fury and goes back to glaring hate at him. Shizuo heaves a sigh and tries again. “You’re not attacking me. You’re still talking and thinking and _existing_ , the fact that you’re a vampire--”

“ _This isn’t existence_ ,” Izaya hisses. “I don’t have a _pulse_. I’ll need to drink _blood_ to keep myself functional. What part of this seems like anything but a curse to you?”

Shizuo clenches his jaw tight. “I don’t want you to die,” he says past gritted teeth. “Can’t you leave it until the morning?”

Izaya’s mouth works on stubbornness. “I’m--”

“A monster,” Shizuo finishes for him. “Yeah, fine. You’re not going to kill anyone tonight, are you? Don’t you trust yourself to hold back for a few hours at least?”

“No,” Izaya says immediately. “I don’t trust monsters.”

Shizuo shuts his eyes, wishes for a moment for patience, for calm, for all the even-handed temper he has always wanted to have and never even come close to achieving. “Fine,” he says, and then he opens his eyes to stare Izaya down where he sits. “Trust me, then.”

Izaya blinks. For just a moment the misery set into every line of his face goes soft, relaxing into startled disbelief, and Shizuo is hit all over again with the uncanny beauty of his features, of all Izaya’s natural good looks turned over on the change in him into something unbearably striking, beauty given an edge with which to strike out and do damage instead of allowing passive admiration. “What?”

“Trust me.” Shizuo shifts his hold on Izaya’s wrist, slides his fingers into a better grip against the fragile line of the other’s arm. He can close his entire hand around Izaya’s wrist, can catch the other’s hand in a cuff made of his own strength. He can’t remember if that was true before, can’t remember if he’s ever noticed before. “I’ll take you to my apartment for the day. I can stop you if you try to get away, we’ve just proven that. And if you hurt me…” Shizuo shrugs, feels the motion ache across the stitches laid over his healing chest. “It won’t be the first time.”

Izaya stares at him for a moment. His eyes are bright, his mouth set; Shizuo can get no read at all on the other’s expression, even when he tries for it. “You’re going to take me to your apartment.”

“Yeah.”

Izaya’s mouth tenses. “You ought to take me in to headquarters.”

“If I take you in I’ll never see you again,” Shizuo says, knowing the words for truth and finding them easier to say than _if I take you in I don’t know what they’ll do to you_.

Izaya keeps staring at him without blinking. “I could kill you while you sleep.”

“I’ll lock you in the bedroom,” Shizuo tells him. “I’ll sleep on the couch. If you try to break the door down the noise will wake me up.” It’s strange to be offering safety precautions as a comfort to the person they’re meant to be used on; but Shizuo can see Izaya’s mouth shifting, can see the hard line of resistance starting to give way into trembling surrender.

“You’re an idiot,” Izaya says, and the quiver in his voice is an agreement even before Shizuo feels the other’s wrist go slack in his hold, feels the tension of rebellion ease from the shoulder under his hand. “I ought to kill you in your sleep just to prove it to you.”

“You won’t,” Shizuo says, certain in the words even before he hears how true they sound on his tongue. “I know you. You’re still you.”

Izaya’s lashes flutter, his face hardens into a wall again. “I’m not,” he says, and that tremor on his voice is gone, lost entirely to the brittle edge of his tone and the fixed set of his jaw over the words. “I’m a monster.” His tone is unswerving, his gaze dark with resistance; but under Shizuo’s hand his shoulder is still relaxed, and when Shizuo loosens his grip enough to let Izaya’s wrist free Izaya lets his hand fall to his lap without any attempt to reach for the knife a foot away from him. He just stays still, staring at Shizuo as the other collects the fallen weapons into his own pockets and out of easy reach for Izaya himself; he’s so absolutely passive that Shizuo wonders, as he turns back, if he’s going to have to carry Izaya bodily back to his apartment. But Izaya lifts his arm when Shizuo offers a hand to pull him to his feet, lets Shizuo close his grip close around the other’s wrist, and if Shizuo has to forcibly pull him to upright at least Izaya seems willing enough to be led into walking via Shizuo’s hold around his wrist. Shizuo can feel the other’s gaze on him, can feel the heat of it like a brand at the back of his neck; but he doesn’t let Izaya’s wrist go, and he doesn’t turn back, just keeps pulling to urge Izaya forward as he unravels the path he travelled to get here in the first place.

Izaya’s wrist is cold inside the cage of his fingers.


	8. Invited

The night is long.

It’s past midnight when Shizuo unlocks the door to his apartment and draws Izaya into the darkened interior; they were full miles from home by the time they headed back through the streets, and Shizuo took the back streets to keep Izaya as far away from the main city and any possible conflict with the crowds there as possible. Izaya didn’t voice any more protest than he did interest; he just kept his head bowed, and his mouth closed, and followed the pull of Shizuo’s grip at his wrist with complete passivity. Shizuo has the strong suspicion that if he were to let the other’s hand go Izaya would just stop walking, would go still and silent to wait for the illumination of daybreak and the destruction that sunlight will bring to him. The thought makes his fingers tense harder against the inhuman chill of Izaya’s wrist, the pressure jumping up past what can possibly be comfortable and into the threat of true pain; but if Izaya feels it he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t so much as hiss reaction to the hurt. He just keeps following, tugged along in Shizuo’s wake as if the other’s hold is a leash, and he follows him through the front gate of the other’s apartment and up the stairs to his door all the same. Shizuo unlocks the door one-handed, and holds it open for the other to follow; but even then Izaya doesn’t move to take the invitation, doesn’t shift as all until Shizuo lets his wrist go so he can brace a hand at Izaya’s shoulder instead to push him bodily inside. Then Izaya stumbles, tripping over his own feet before he can catch his balance enough to move forward, and Shizuo follows him forward into the dark, clearing the entrance to his apartment before he lets the door swing shut and turns the latch to hold them both inside the space.

“It’s not very big,” Shizuo says, reaching out to fumble for the switch alongside the door. The glow of the overhead light casts the room into illumination bright enough to make him flinch from the glow for the first few heartbeats; by the time he’s blinked the light from his eyes Izaya has lifted his head enough to look around, his movement the first voluntary action he’s taken since Shizuo pulled him to his feet. There’s not much to see: the few squares of tile in the kitchen, the few feet of carpet that make a space to serve as living and dining room at once. Farther down the hall there’s the door to the bedroom left open when Shizuo left to wander the streets earlier; the hours prior feel like a lifetime ago. “I can keep an eye on you here.”

“You live alone,” Izaya says without turning his head. His voice is flat; it makes the words sound more a statement than a question.

Shizuo frowns at the dark of the other’s hair. “Yes, I live alone,” he repeats, pulling the words into a huff of irritation. “It’s not like I could very well have a family with the work I do. The late-night hours are impossible to explain.” He braces a hand at the door so he can work his shoes free. “Besides, I have my hands more than full looking after you. I don’t need anyone else to worry about in my life.” Izaya shifts, his head turning so he can look back over his shoulder at Shizuo; his gaze is still cast down, his lashes still hiding the new scarlet glow of his eyes, but at least Shizuo can see the line of his mouth this way, can try to make something out of the deliberate blankness across the other’s features. It eases some fraction of the tension in his chest, lets his breathing rush out of him in a spill of relief as he pushes his shoes to rest alongside the door. “Take your shoes off and I’ll show you around.”

“I think I’ve already seen everything,” Izaya says, but he’s moving without any delay, returning over the distance Shizuo pushed him and ducking his head as he braces one shoe against the other so he can draw his foot free. His hair looks darker than Shizuo had noticed in the dim illumination of the night; it’s always been glossy black, but now it looks like something beyond dark, as if the weight of the strands around his face are swallowing the light entirely to leave a shadow of their own making in place of any kind of color. From this close up Shizuo can almost taste the strange weight of Izaya’s skin in the air, like electricity given physical presence to crackle against the back of his teeth when he breathes in; it’s a strange comfort to know that that, at least, hasn’t changed.

Shizuo’s still watching when Izaya slips free of his second shoe and pushes them both aside with one foot. They fit into the gap alongside the door, lining up perfectly just clear of the entrance, and then Izaya lifts his head to fix Shizuo with the brilliant color of his shifted eyes. His mouth is set, his jaw trembling with tension he’s holding to strained silence instead of giving voice to; his eyes are radiant with color, startlingly beautiful in the light from overhead, and so flat with resigned misery that Shizuo can’t stand to keep looking at them long. He turns away instead, clearing his throat as he gestures towards the main room of his apartment.

“Living room. Kitchen.” He takes a step forward down the hall; Izaya stays where he is, unmoving in the entryway behind him. Shizuo huffs frustration and reaches back to close his hold on Izaya’s arm and pull the other forward bodily; Izaya trails after him, obedient to the demand of Shizuo’s hold and with his steps coming so slow Shizuo is sure it’s only his urging keeping Izaya moving forward.

“Bathroom’s in there.” Shizuo gestures towards the dark of the open doorway without pausing; Izaya doesn’t try to draw his hand free, doesn’t so much as stutter his steps. It’s like having a doll mechanically trailing in Shizuo’s footsteps. He never thought he would miss the bite of Izaya’s usual commentary. “And bedroom.” Shizuo steps forward through the open door, reaching to switch on the light; the illumination throws everything into stark relief, from the pants he left hanging over the chair in the corner to the tangle of the sheets left unmade when he got up this morning. He grimaces and drops Izaya’s arm so he can reach to collect the clothes and fold them into minimal tidiness; Izaya’s hand falls to his side, his whole stance going heavy and slack where he stands as Shizuo moves.

“You can stay in here,” Shizuo says, pulling open the dresser so he can fit his pants away where they belong and shove the drawer shut before turning to the bed and the rumpled sheets across it. “Are you tired?”

“No,” Izaya says. He’s watching Shizuo from the doorway, his expression blank of anything except vague attention to the other’s movement. “I feel fine.”

Shizuo pauses with the edge of the comforter in his hands, feeling a frown threaten his lips as he considers Izaya in the doorway. Izaya’s gaze draws up from the grip of Shizuo’s hands at the sheets to meet the other’s eyes instead; there’s no interest behind his stare either, just the same blank attention that drew his feet forward in answer to the other’s urging. Shizuo’s chest tenses, his heart aches.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says, his fingers clenching on the edge of the blanket in his hold. “We’ll figure something out. You’re going to be alright.”

Izaya’s lashes dip over the motion of a blink. His expression doesn’t shift. “You should take me in to headquarters,” he says, and his voice is as flat as if he’s reciting memorized lines. “I shouldn’t be left free.”

Shizuo groans. “Fuck,” he says, and turns back to the bed to shove the blanket down into some kind of tidiness. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m not going to turn you over to C3?”

“You should,” Izaya tells him, a mantra on his tongue stripped clean of any kind of personal investment in what he’s saying, in what he’s suggesting Shizuo do to him. “If you were a real human you would.”

“I don’t care,” Shizuo tells him. He steps forward to the doorway, where Izaya is still standing framed by the entrance; when he reaches for the other’s wrist Izaya capitulates to the tug to take a few steps farther into the room. “You’re my partner, I’m not going to turn you over to C3 just like that.”

“I would,” Izaya says to the far side of the room, his jaw set and his gaze unflinching. “If you were turned.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Shizuo says, and Izaya does look at him then, his gaze skipping sideways as his mouth tenses on a frown. It’s a minimal reaction, just a flicker of anger behind his eyes for a heartbeat’s worth of time, but Shizuo can feel the proof of emotion like a surge of heat through his body, of relief so strong it floods him with a wave of unexpected adrenaline. “I know you.”

“You don’t,” Izaya tells him, and he pulls hard at Shizuo’s hold on his arm to wrench himself free of the other’s grip as he turns his head away. His hair falls in front of his features, the dark weight of it making a curtain before his expression so all Shizuo can see is the pale curve of his neck over the collar of his shirt and the forward hunch of his shoulders on that same anger that fired some measure of life back into him.

“You can stay here,” Shizuo tells him, rather than pushing the point of the argument. “I’ll be in the other room if you need anything.” He takes a step back and through the line of the doorway; Izaya doesn’t turn, doesn’t move, doesn’t show any sign of noticing Shizuo’s words or movement either one.

“I’ll check on you before the morning,” Shizuo tells him, and then he’s moving away, backing out of the room and drawing the door closed with just slightly more delay than he needs to. He keeps his gaze on Izaya as long as he can, ready for the shift of the other’s shoulders or the tilt of his head to indicate some flicker of interest; but Izaya might as well be a statue for all that he moves, and the door clicks shut between them to hold Izaya on one side and Shizuo on the other.

Shizuo retreats to the living room. It’s the small hours of the morning, he’s sure on another night he would be tired enough to sleep even in the relative discomfort of the main space; but his heart is pounding, his body too hot with adrenaline and his mind too busy with thoughts to be calmed to sleep. He makes a cup of tea instead, taking his time over the process while his mind ranges across far more than the mundane work of preparing the tea leaves and boiling the water, and then he sits down at his table with the mug in front of him and a book to read, and he stares at the far side of the room without seeing it at all while his thoughts navigate the complexities of the current situation. He means to read, to distract himself from the present with the addition of something else to focus on, but the book goes untouched while he turns over the difficulties of the present over and over again without finding any way free of them. He can’t take Izaya in to C3; that much he’s sure of, was sure of before they ever left the shadows of that moonlit alley on the other side of town. But Izaya is only passive, not compliant, and Shizuo doesn’t know how much of that is due to the effects of shock that will surely fade over the span of the next few hours or days. Shizuo can hardly plan to keep Izaya away from sharp objects for the foreseeable future, and that’s not even dealing with the issue of sunlight; all Izaya would need would be a few minutes alone with an open window at midday and he can remove the monster he considers himself from any further effect on the world. The very idea twists Shizuo’s stomach, clenches against his heart until it’s hard to breathe; but he doesn’t know what he can do instead. It’s not as if he can stay awake all the time to make sure Izaya remains safe from himself as much as from C3, and if Izaya resists any more than the token verbal protests he’s given so far Shizuo isn’t sure he’ll be able to keep the other under control. Besides all that, even if he _could_ keep Izaya under supervision every moment of the day he’s not sure he would want to. It hardly seems fair, to insist that his life is valuable and then prevent him from experiencing it; but Shizuo can see no other option, can’t even see a clear solution for the short term of the next few days. Izaya was out on a mission from C3, surely they’ll go looking for him when he fails to report in; it won’t be a leap of logic to determine what must have happened, and if they come looking for him during the day there will be no way at all to keep Izaya safe from them. It’s only a matter of time before--

There’s a knock at the door.

Shizuo freezes. For a moment he thinks of pretending sleep, of remaining silent and hoping that his early-morning visitor leaves without trying some more dramatic form of entry. But his light is on, the warm glow of it clearly visible from outside the apartment, and Shizuo has personal experience that says that in a fight between his door and C3, C3 is going to be the victor. He glances around the room, scanning for any tell of Izaya’s presence as he pushes to his feet; but his living room is as tidy as it ever is, absent anything but the evidence of his own late-night waking. He can claim insomnia, he thinks as he heads for the door, as he unlatches the deadbolt and turns the handle; and then he looks down as the door swings open, and sees the extra set of shoes alongside the entrance just as it’s too late to hide them.

“Hey,” Shizuo says, his excuse forming on his lips as he looks up, ready to offer a last-ditch attempt at deception even as he’s sure, now, it will fail. “I couldn’t--” and then he sees who’s on the other side of the door, and his words die to silence in his throat.

It’s not C3. Shizuo had been braced for Kuzuhara, for some array of the familiar faces he’s never been able to match to names in his always-brief visits to headquarters to receive a new mission or report back after a previous one. But the pair standing on the other side of his door now are more than passingly familiar, even if Shizuo’s only seen them once before in his life, and he has no trouble at all in fixing names to match the porcelain-doll beauty and manic cheer on the faces confronting him.

“Hello!” Shinra says, lifting a hand into a wave as inexplicably cheerful as the smile he’s offering. “I’m glad we caught you before sunrise. May we come in?” From over his shoulder Celty folds her hands into an obvious plea, ducking her head forward as if to ask permission to enter with her body instead of her words.

Shizuo stares at them for a moment, his thoughts whirling too fast to steady. He has a thousand questions, all of them running up over each other too quickly to parse into separate phrases. But Shinra asked a question, and in the back of the dizzy spin of his thoughts Shizuo’s mind is forming an answer, shaping it in his throat and against his tongue while he’s still struggling to make sense of the reality of the moment.

“Sure,” Shizuo says, and steps aside to make space for the other two to come into the entryway. “Come in.”

It’s not like this is the first vampire he’s invited in tonight.


	9. Sincere

“Celty was worried about the two of you,” Shinra explains from the position he’s taken up at the corner of Shizuo’s table, just at the elbow of his silent Servamp. “Well, your partner specifically. You hit him pretty hard, after all.”

Shizuo grimaces over the teapot he’s filling with hot water. “Yeah, I know.”

“So she set a tether on him,” Shinra goes on with as much carelessness as if this is an absolutely normal thing to do and not indicative of an unhealthy level of personal investment. “She said she just wanted to make sure everything turned out okay -- she doesn’t like the idea of anyone getting hurt on her behalf, even when it’s their own fault -- but then she ran into her brother, and things got a little hectic, and the next thing we knew you had left and we had to track you back across the city. It’s been a long night for us, even more than usual!”

“I bet.” Shizuo braces a hand at the counter to support himself while he waits for the tea to steep. He can feel exhaustion in the line of his shoulders, the exertion of the night settling in like a weight in spite of the brief surge of adrenaline that came with his unexpected visitors. On the other side of the window the sky is beginning to lighten into the first edges of grey that promise daybreak; Shizuo thinks distantly that he’ll have to go in to check on Izaya soon to make sure the other hasn’t pulled the blinds open in hopes of catching a few destructive rays of light against too-pale skin. “Why did you come here, though?”

“Your partner got turned,” Shinra says bluntly, without any softening of his tone as he offers the bland accuracy of the statement. Shizuo flinches, his attention coming up from the teapot to land at Shinra’s face, and Shinra smiles calmly at him from the other side of the table. “By another Servamp, wasn’t it? He’s a subclass himself, now.”

“What about it?” Shizuo asks, feeling his shoulders tense with a measure of protectiveness more than exhaustion. “I thought you’d be willing to let him live like this, _you_ can’t have any issues with leaving vampires alive.”

Shinra blinks. “Oh, no, of course not. If you want to deal with it yourselves we can leave again and leave you to it! We just thought you might want some help. Celty says it’s the responsibility of the Servamp to make sure their subclasses are ready to go out into the world.”

“Responsibility?” Shizuo asks. “What are you talking about?”

Celty shakes her head, the movement enough to pull Shizuo’s attention towards her. She’s reaching into her pocket for a phone and sliding it open so she can tap over the keys; there’s a moment of quiet, a pause with only the sound of her fingers against the plastic to fill the silence, and then she’s offering the phone sideways to Shinra next to her. Shinra leans in closer than he probably needs to, near enough that his shoulder bumps against Celty’s, but the Servamp doesn’t pull away, and Shinra’s attention is focused on the phone screen in front of him.

“Servamps can turn subclasses whenever they want,” he says in a vaguely professorial tone, clearly reading the text directly from the screen in front of him. “It’s kind of like making children.” Celty is still typing, her fingers weighting at the keys of the phone to offer more information, and Shinra keeps reading aloud without looking up from the screen. “Most Servamps look after their subclasses too, at least at the beginning while they get used to living as vampires. It can be a rough transition left to their own devices, apparently, they usually end up dead or captured by C3 if they’re alone.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo says, thinking of the array of subclasses he and Izaya have brought in over the years, feeling his spine prickle with an uncomfortable shiver of self-consciousness. “I can see that.”

“Most Servamps just turn those that are dying already, as a means of offering them another chance at life,” Shinra continues. “The subclass doesn’t get a chance to decide whether they want it or not, of course, which is why Celty doesn’t have any right now.” He pauses for a moment, skimming over the next few lines of text; when he speaks again his voice is bright with amused shock directed to the woman next to him instead of to Shizuo across the room. “Celty! I had no idea you had such strong feelings towards anyone other than me!” He sounds like he’s laughing; as he turns his head up to look at Celty he does laugh in truth, his expression breaking into warmth for a moment’s time.

“What,” Shizuo says, grating the words past the knot of frustration building in him in time with the sunrise starting to glow light against the horizon. “What is it?”

“It’s her brother,” Shinra says, looking back to Shizuo with the remnant of his laughter still clinging to his lips. “She doesn’t think much of him.”

Shizuo’s eyebrows go up. “Her _brother_?”

“Yes,” Shinra says. “The other Servamp.” He waves a hand as if to brush aside Shizuo’s shocked expression. “They all call each other that, brother, sister, like they’re all part of one family. They _do_ all have the same creator, so I guess that’s reasonable. Would that make the new subclass your nephew?” he asks Celty, turning back to her as fast as his attention wanders; Celty rolls her eyes and smacks against Shinra’s shoulder before gesturing insistently at the phone screen in front of her. “Ah. Right. She means the other Servamp, the one who turned your partner. He likes to turn hunters that catch up with him, apparently, waits until he has the upper hand and then turns them by force before leaving them for their own organization or the sun to catch up with them, whichever comes first.” Shinra shrugs, dismissing the entire concept with casual disregard. “He thinks it’s funny.”

“It’s not _funny_ ,” Shizuo grates past his set jaw. “I saw Izaya _die_ , he still wants me to kill him, what about that is _funny_?”

“In the Servamp’s defense you _were_ hunting him,” Shinra points out. “Or your partner was, anyway.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo growls. “If I had gone with him we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”

Shinra shrugs. “Or you would have been the one turned,” he points out. “Who knows if your partner would have been as understanding of your situation as you’re being of his?”

Shizuo’s fingers tighten against the counter, his grip straining against the support of the tile under his hands. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, fighting to get the words to fit into coherency instead of the vicious growl he wants to offer with them. “He’s the one who got turned and I’m not going to take him in to C3.”

“Yes,” Shinra says, blinking interest up at Shizuo across the room. “That’s very generous and understanding of you. But he’s going to need to understand some things about his current situation if he plans to continue existing as a vampire, and since his maker isn’t here to do it he’ll need to hear it from Celty.” Celty draws the phone back towards herself and starts typing again. Shizuo can see the frown at her lips, can see the soft weight of sympathy drawing down against her mouth as she works out her response before offering the phone to Shinra again. Shinra reads over the text in front of him in full this time before he speaks.

“Celty says she’s sorry,” he says, looking up to meet Shizuo’s gaze from across the room. Shinra looks focused, more intrigued than otherwise; it’s Celty who’s offering sympathy, her unhappiness so clear in her expression Shizuo can see it even with the distraction of those blood-red lips and illuminated eyes. “About your partner. She says her brother has been doing this for years but he’s too strong for her to make him stop.” Shinra shrugs, tipping his head into dismissal of the question. “There’s nothing to be done about it now, anyway.”

“There is.”

It’s another voice, from neither of the two at the table, but Shizuo doesn’t have to struggle to identify the speaker. He knows that tone too well, is too used to hearing it from the unseen shadows just before the conclusion to a fight, even if the tone is far flatter with intention now than he’s used to hearing it. Shinra and Celty both look up towards the hallway, their expressions falling into a matched set of surprise; Shizuo turns more slowly, sure of what he’ll see even before his gaze lands on Izaya in the entrance.

He doesn’t look well. The inhuman pallor of his skin is drawing all the veins under his skin to shadowed blue and coloring the red of his eyes and mouth to uncanny sharpness, as if to call attention to the unnatural brilliance of the scarlet. He has a hand against the wall, his fingers spread wide and his arm braced as if he’s trusting his balance more to that point of contact than to his feet; but at his side his free hand is clenched into a fist, the pressure of his fingers against his palm so strong Shizuo can see the shift of tendons underneath his skin. He looks consumptive, like a fever patient from some tragic poem or old-fashioned novel; but his gaze is fixed, his expression set, and when he speaks his voice is as hard as diamond, set enough that Shizuo is sure he could shatter all his strength against it and never leave so much as a scratch.

“I can do something about it.” Izaya’s not looking at Shizuo at all, is entirely ignoring Shinra on the far edge of the table; his attention is all fixed on Celty, his gaze as unflinching as the weight of his voice in his throat. “I’m going to kill him.”

Shinra’s laugh is almost painful against the quiet of the room. “You’re going to kill a Servamp?” he asks, amusement clear in his throat as if he thinks Izaya might be joking, as if the idea is too absurd to possibly be taken seriously. “That’s almost impossible, you know, there’s no way you’ll be able to destroy your own creator.”

“I will,” Izaya says, looking like he’s on the verge of collapse and sounding like an immoveable force. “I’ll find a way.” His hand against the wall shifts, his fingers flexing like he’s trying to make a fist of that hand too. “He made me into a monster. I’ll kill him for that.”

Shinra laughs again, like he’s amused by the very idea. Shizuo doesn’t. He can recognize the sincerity in Izaya’s tone.


	10. Expression

“You can’t destroy your own maker!” Shinra chirps from the far side of the table. “No one does that, no matter how upset they are.”

“I don’t care.” Izaya has his head down and his arms wrapped around himself; his shoulders are set forward, his whole body tipping in over his corner of the table like he’s establishing a defensible space there. He’s not looking at Shinra; he has his gaze fixed on the table in front of him, specifically on the cup of tea he refused when Shizuo offered it to him. His jaw is set on determination, his mouth pressed into a hard line; he looks brittle, protective, as if he thinks he’ll shatter if anyone so much as touches him and is determined to avoid all physical contact. It’s hard to look at him. Shizuo can barely focus on anything else. “I didn’t ask what others do. I’m telling you what I’m going to do.”

“It’s very difficult to even take down a Servamp,” Shinra tells him. “You’d have to break their contract item, to start, and getting your hands on that will be almost impossible in the first place.”

“ _Almost_ ,” Izaya repeats. “What’s his contract item?”

Celty shakes her head. Izaya isn’t looking to see the movement, but Shinra gives the negation voice without even needing to read it off the screen of Celty’s phone. “We don’t know. Every Servamp’s is different, and it changes anytime they get a new Eve.”

Izaya’s gaze skips up to Celty across the table from him, his attention fixed on intensity. “What’s yours?”

Celty blinks. Shizuo can see her shoulders tense, can see the way she angles back from the edge of the table like she’s bracing against a blow, like Izaya’s question had the knife edge in truth that is so clear under the tone of his voice.

Izaya doesn’t seem to notice, or doesn’t care. “What is it?” he demands again. “It’s something your Eve gives you, right? What did he give you?”

Shizuo reaches out over the edge of the table, reflex urging his fingers over the gap to brush against Izaya’s sleeve. “Izaya, just--”

“What was it?” Izaya says again, a little louder and a lot harder. He jerks his arm away from Shizuo without even looking at him; it makes Shizuo’s jaw tense. He can feel the first beginnings of frustration starting against his spine, can feel the start of anger settling itself into the angle of his shoulders. “He seems like the sappy type. Did he propose to you with a ring or something like that?”

“It’s her phone.”

Shinra’s voice is startling. Shizuo had been watching the angle of Celty’s shoulders, trying to gauge the rising defensiveness in the line of the vampire’s stance balanced against the forward lean Izaya is making over the table, like he’s trying to force himself into her personal space or maybe draw out a measure of aggression towards himself. Izaya looks reckless, desperate and a little bit hazy, like his coherency is fracturing against the promise of destruction offered by the Servamp in front of him; it’s more than enough to hold all Shizuo’s attention, between Izaya’s invitation to violence and the true threat offered by Celty herself. He had completely forgotten about the other human at the table until Shinra speaks, the clear tone of his voice cutting through the tension with all the precise effect of a scalpel against skin. All three heads turn, three pairs of eyes fix on Shinra, and the other beams back at them, his whole face bright with unselfconscious innocence.

“It’s her phone,” he repeats, gesturing towards the black phone in Celty’s hand. She pulls it in towards herself as he speaks, pressing it close against her chest as if to keep it safe, but Shinra is looking back to Izaya and doesn’t see the gesture. “I gave it to her the first night we met.”

Celty ducks her head, flicking open her phone and typing rapidly against the keys. Shizuo can imagine what she’s saying just from the pace of her typing and the set of her expression; even when she offers the phone to Shinra it’s more turning it around towards the other than really extending it out into the open space across the table.

“He would have found out eventually anyway,” Shinra says, sounding utterly unperturbed by the reveal that Celty is obviously protesting. He’s watching Celty again, smiling all across his face; Shizuo has the strong impression Shinra entirely ignores he and Izaya’s existence when he’s looking at his Servamp partner. “It’s a sign of our trust in him, anyway!”

“Yeah,” Izaya says. “ _Trust_ ” and he’s moving, lunging over the table so fast Shizuo can barely track the motion of his arm as he reaches for the phone in Celty’s hand. His fingers close around the top edge of the plastic, his wrist tenses with intent to pull it away; and there’s an explosion of shadow so sudden and so dark Shizuo has the brief, startling impression that he’s gone blind. His vision is striped over with shadows whipping through the air like so many ribbons of absent illumination; and then Shizuo blinks, and the darkness clarifies to a still image: Celty clutching at her phone, her whole body curling in around it protectively as streamers of shadow spill from her shoulders like extensions of the dark clothing covering her pale skin, and Izaya all but cocooned on the other side of the table, his arms pinned close against his sides and his whole body fixed rigid by the grip of the darkness given life.

“See,” Izaya says, his tone as impressively calm as his expression as he stares back at Celty on the other side of the table. “You don’t even have to trust me, not when you can move that fast.”

“Exactly,” Shinra says. He still sounds perfectly calm; the attention he’s giving to Izaya is more intrigued than concerned, judging from the slight curve at the corner of his mouth. “You see how suicidal it is for you to go up against a Servamp? You’ll never even get your hands on the contract item before you’re dead.”

“At least I can try,” Izaya says, his voice as flat as the faint glow of his eyes. It’s strange that his irises can be throwing off illumination of their own and still look dimmer than they did before his change. “Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

Shinra shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says. Celty begins to carefully ease her shadows back and away from Izaya; Izaya makes no attempt to struggle free, just stays still as the bonds holding his arms to his sides slide loose to grant him mobility again. “It’s a suicide mission, but if that’s how you want to go that’s your call to make.”

“Fine.” Izaya sounds as calm as he looks; the only hint of tension in his face is just along his jaw, set against the movement of his throat as he swallows in the faintest tell for strain. Shizuo doesn’t think anyone else would even notice it, doesn’t think anyone else would even know where to look; Shinra certainly doesn’t seem to care, judging from the doting smile he’s turning back to Celty. Izaya doesn’t wait to regain the others’ attention; he just keeps speaking in that same deliberately flat tone, metering out the words to careful clarity on his tongue. “I’ll take it from here then. Thank you for the information, but I’ll be working alone from this point on.”

“No you won’t.”

It’s strange to see the expressions around the table shift. Shizuo only offers a handful of words, with hardly any meaning behind them at all; but every other person in the room turns towards him, their attention caught by this sudden break in his silent observation. Celty looked startled by his voice, Shinra shocked by the reminder of Shizuo’s very existence; but Shizuo’s not looking at them, because Izaya’s turning too, his eyes going wider and that carefully composed calm across his face giving way to a strange, brilliant attention as he looks at Shizuo. There’s a softness behind his eyes, a tremor at his mouth, a thousand different reactions flickering over his face in heartbeat-quick succession; and Shizuo stares right back at him, watching the play of emotion over Izaya’s features and feeling some dark, vicious satisfaction at having shattered his way past the other’s mask of calm.

“You won’t work alone,” Shizuo repeats, holding Izaya’s gaze as he offers the words. Izaya’s forehead creases, his mouth twists on understanding; for a moment he looks like he’s about to laugh, or maybe like he’s about to burst into tears, caught so precisely between the two reactions that he can’t decide which one to let free over his expression. Shizuo’s heart skids, his breathing catches, but he doesn’t look away from the bright focus in Izaya’s gaze on him. “We’re partners.” He takes a breath; as he lets it out he can feel calm settling into his chest, can feel the weight of certainty fitting itself against the pattern of his heartbeat as if to force it to a stronger rhythm, to urge it to enough stability to bear the weight of two existences instead of just one. “I’m coming with you.”

From across the table Shinra chirps a laugh, from next to him Shizuo can see Celty catch a startled inhale of surprise. But Izaya is still staring at him, his mouth still oddly soft and his lashes heavy with too much emotion to bear, and when he ducks his head to cast his gaze down to the table it’s not enough to entirely hide the pained gratitude in his expression from Shizuo’s sight.

Even with his uncannily beautiful features, Shizuo thinks, it’s an incredibly human expression.


	11. Silent

It’s very quiet in the bedroom.

Shinra and Celty laid claim to the living room, accepting Shizuo’s halfhearted offer of a place to stay through the daylight hours with such speed that he would be irritated if he weren’t already all out of energy to muster any kind of reaction to the events going on around him. It’s hardly any further strain than what he’s already taken on to cede the narrow space of his living room to the Servamp with her Eve wrapped close around her like a second shadow to match the dark of her clothes, and besides Shizuo appreciates the excuse the situation provides him to settle into the bedroom with Izaya. There’s only one window, and that covered with the heavy curtains that Shizuo purchased with the advent of his job at C3 and the associated nocturnal sleep schedule that came with it; but it would be an easy thing to pull the fabric open and let the spill of sunlight flood the room, and Shizuo is willing to trust Izaya with his life but not with Izaya’s own, not under the circumstances. He takes up a position directly under the window, stretched out on the floor under one of the pair of comforters from the bed, but he rather thinks he could have taken them both for all the use Izaya is making of the second. The other hasn’t moved at all since Shizuo followed him into the room, just stretched out over Shizuo’s mattress with his back to the door and to Shizuo himself and went more absolutely still than Shizuo thought he was capable of. In the silence all Shizuo can hear is the rhythm of his own breathing, the pace of it sounding loud and lonely without its usual match from Izaya; it keeps him awake, as if it’s enough to pull him up and into consciousness with his own exhales, and he ends up staring up at the edge of the blinds, gazing at the faint glow of illumination that is at most an inconvenience for him and now offers mortal danger to Izaya so quiet on the bed behind him.

“You don’t have to stay awake.”

The words are a murmur, so low Shizuo thinks he might not even stir for them if he had been able to drift into unconsciousness, if he had successfully lost himself to the hazy invention offered by restless dreams. But he’s as awake as Izaya’s statement implies, and his heart skips on the proof of someone else’s existence, and when he moves it’s to turn his head towards the bed, where his night vision can just make out the slant of Izaya’s shoulders and the curve of his waist down to his hip. He’s curled in on himself, both arms drawn in close against his chest; the position makes a curve of his spine, forms the whole structure of his body into the outline of a cage, as if to make a wall around the weight of his unbeating heart.

“I’m not,” Shizuo says without looking away. Izaya’s hair is falling off the pale line of his neck; there’s a gap between the collar of his coat and the weight of his hair, a space wide enough to leave bare the top few vertebrae of his spine. Shizuo’s memory offers up the sound of bone giving way, of that fragility cracking to a violent force, and he shakes his head to scatter the thought, to push the too-vivid memory from his mind again. “I can’t sleep.”

“I’m not going to open the blinds,” Izaya says, as if he hasn’t heard Shizuo speak at all. “I’m out for revenge, now, there’s no point in me dying before I get back at the one who turned me.”

Shizuo can feel his jaw flex, can feel his shoulders tense on strain. “There’s no point to you dying then either,” he says, pushing the words past the set of his jaw. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

“There’s nothing to figure out,” Izaya says without turning around. “I’m a monster. The only good that can come of that is me hunting down the greater threat now that I’m strong enough to do so.”

“So do that,” Shizuo says. He pushes himself sideways to come up onto an elbow, as if the change in position will grant the frown he turns at Izaya’s back physical weight. “Go on hunting vampires. It’s not like you have to go out in the day to do that anyway. You’ll probably be better at it now than you were, even.”

“Now that I’m not a fragile human?” Izaya asks, the words sharp enough to be clearly rhetorical.

Shizuo ignores the intention of Izaya’s response. “ _Yes_ ,” he growls. “You could have died tonight.”

“I _did_ ” and Izaya’s turning impossibly quickly, twisting over the sheets on the bed to turn and face Shizuo. His hair is rumpled around his face, his mouth soft and dark with that new color it never used to have; his eyes are crimson in the dim of the room. “I did die. I should have stayed that way.”

“ _No_ ,” Shizuo snaps, and it’s his turn to move, to twist around and up onto his knees so he can lunge towards the bed, so he can grab a handful of Izaya’s coat and drag the other in closer to him. Izaya’s lashes dip, unneeded breath rushes out of him; when he throws a hand out it’s to catch himself at Shizuo’s shoulder, to steady his balance before the other pulls him off the bed entirely. Shizuo barely notices. “Don’t say that, don’t you _dare_ say that, I _saw_ you die.” His chest is pressurizing, his throat is closing up; he can feel his breathing catching on itself, refusing to fall into the simplicity of an easy rhythm so every inhale is a struggle. “You went out alone and I was too late to help and I would have...you would have…” Shizuo’s throat knots into misery, the emotion of _what if_ too clearly outlined for him to avoid. It takes him a moment to catch his breath, to form the shape of his thoughts back to some kind of coherency, and even then he’s hoarse with emotion, he can feel his eyes burning with the threat of tears barely held back against his lashes. “I would have lost you.”

Izaya stares at him. His expression is wholly unreadable, his features so blank and so beautiful that he looks like a doll, that Shizuo would think him to be some kind of uncanny sculpture except for the very slight tremor of his touch against Shizuo’s shoulder. There’s no flicker of acknowledgment behind his lashes, no tension of acceptance or rejection at his mouth; he just gazes at Shizuo, offering focus without attention as whatever he’s thinking goes past unseen behind the mask he’s making of his expression. Shizuo stares back, his heart pounding too hard to let him look away even as his vision blurs with those tears he can’t quite manage to entirely restrain; and then Izaya’s gaze shifts, his focus sliding away from Shizuo’s eyes and down his face instead. His attention is weighty, it lingers like a touch against Shizuo’s face; he can feel the intensity of Izaya’s consideration across his cheekbones, pressing to his lips, clinging to the line of his jaw. Izaya’s gaze drags down, wandering across the tension Shizuo can feel in every line of his expression, and then it stops, freezing into place as that blank mask collapses into sudden intensity. Izaya’s lashes dip, weighting heavy over the glow of his eyes, and against Shizuo’s shoulder his hand shifts, his fingers slipping sideways by an inch to drag over the weight of the other’s shirt. Shizuo frowns confusion, starts to shift to draw back from that consideration in Izaya’s gaze; and then fingertips press against his skin, Izaya’s thumb slides down against the curve of  his neck, and he goes absolutely still, his entire body locking into place as he realizes what it is that so holds Izaya’s attention.

Izaya’s touch is cold. It’s strange to feel the texture of fingertips dragging across skin with none of the human warmth to which Shizuo is accustomed; it feels like ice, Shizuo can feel the shudder of sensation under Izaya’s fingers run down his spine to speed the beat of his heart in his chest. Izaya’s thumb presses hard, weighting against the rhythm of Shizuo’s pulse in his throat like he’s feeling out the pattern of it, like he’s trying to relearn the feel of life to fit against the chill of his skin, and Shizuo doesn’t move, barely breathes, just stares at Izaya gazing with absolute intent at his throat. Izaya’s lashes dip, his lips part; Shizuo can see the points of white teeth catch the dim illumination, can see Izaya’s head tilt to the side like he’s considering how to fit himself against Shizuo’s skin. Shizuo’s heart is racing, surely Izaya can feel the rush of it under his fingertips; but as Izaya’s thumb slides Shizuo tips his head to the side, just by an inch, just enough to make the offering of his skin clear. He can’t catch his breath, can’t calm the speed of his heart in his chest, but Izaya’s hand is sliding against him, Izaya’s leaning in, Izaya is going to…

Shizuo hears the inhale first. It’s a hiss of sound, a breath of startled realization from just at his shoulder; there’s force behind it, the sound of shock clear against his ear, and Shizuo can feel the moment shatter even before Izaya’s hand at his shoulder tightens to shove him back and away. The force is greater than Shizuo was expecting, more than he’s ever felt from Izaya before; he topples backwards before he can even think to offer resistance, his grip on Izaya’s coat giving way as the other wrenches back and away from him with desperate haste. Shizuo hits the floor hard, the impact enough to knock all the air from his lungs in a gusting huff, and on the bed Izaya is shoving himself backwards, pressing his shoulders flat to the wall and making fists at the sheets under him to hold himself as far away from Shizuo as he can get. His mouth is closed, his jaw flexing hard on the effort he’s bringing to the action, and if his face was blank before it’s a storm of emotion now, from the dark of the crease over his forehead to the tension pinching pain against the corners of his eyes.

“You did,” Izaya says, hissing the words past teeth gritted so hard Shizuo can barely make sense of the words. “You did lose me.” Shizuo takes a breath, pushes his weight up over his elbow as he shifts, and Izaya flinches as if Shizuo had offered a blow, turning his head and closing his eyes as his shoulders hunch in around himself. Shizuo goes still, feeling as if he’s the one who pushed Izaya across the floor instead of the other way around; for a moment the room is very still but for the sound of Shizuo’s too-fast breathing.

Finally Shizuo manages to fill his lungs and clear the tension in his throat enough to offer speech, as careful and gentle as he can make it against the strain of Izaya’s silence. “Izaya--”

“I’m just a monster now,” Izaya says, cutting off what comfort Shizuo intended to offer before it’s formed. “I’m not a person anymore.” He opens his eyes, the shadow of his lashes giving way to his eyes glowing red like dying stars; he doesn’t turn his head to meet Shizuo’s gaze, doesn’t look away from the bare wall in front of him. “I’m not your partner anymore.”

“You are,” Shizuo says, but Izaya jerks his head in a negation so immediate and so violent it stops Shizuo’s words at his lips and steals the voice from his chest. The room goes quiet, silence straining itself to weight in the space between them; and then Izaya draws his knees in closer to his chest, and turns away from Shizuo’s gaze, and the interaction is over, any further rebuttal severed before Shizuo has even managed to frame it to coherency in his head. He’s left to push himself back to upright, to recover his balance as he works past the knot in his throat and the lingering heat behind his eyes and in his veins while Izaya stares unseeing at the wall in front of him. From the look of things, he has no intention of so much as breathing before the sun sinks below the horizon to offer the safety of darkness now demanded by his new existence; but Shizuo still returns to his position under the window, just in case. It takes him a few minutes to resettle himself with his shoulders on the floor and the blanket over him; and then he lies as still as he can, easing his breathing from the adrenaline-rushed haste it had and into something calmer, slower, as soft and gentle as he can make it.

It’s still the loudest sound in the room.


	12. Tolerate

“So,” Shinra says cheerfully from the far side of Shizuo’s table. “You have no plan at all then, is that right?”

Izaya scowls at him from where he’s leaning against the frame of the doorway to Shizuo’s bedroom. “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been saying? _Yes_ , I have a plan.”

“Which consists of wandering the city hoping your maker comes looking for you again.” Shinra leans back from the table and braces himself into a casual slouch against one hand behind him. “That’s a _terrible_ plan.”

“Yeah,” Izaya snaps. “Do you have anything better? Maybe your monster wife has some clever suggestions she can text to us, how about it?”

“Oh no,” Shinra says, waving a hand to easily sweep aside the possibility of giving Izaya anything better to work with. “It’s not that I have any improvements to offer. It’s just that that idea is really awful.”

“There’s nothing else we can do,” Shizuo puts in from what is rapidly becoming his assigned spot in the kitchen, equidistant between Shinra and Celty sitting at the table and the harsh angle of Izaya’s shoulders braced at the doorway. “We don’t have any better leads to follow.”

Shinra shrugs. “You could always give up,” he points out. “He’s not causing you any problems right now. Why not just settle into your new life and deal with him if he wants to show back up later?”

“ _Not causing problems_ ,” Izaya repeats, his voice dropping to strain over the words in a way that makes Shizuo cringe in anticipation of the explosion to come. “He turned me into a _monster_ , what part of that isn’t causing me _problems_?”  
“He could have killed you outright,” Shinra points out without even batting an eye at the vicious edge on Izaya’s voice. “Would you have preferred to die?”

“This isn’t productive,” Shizuo says from the kitchen, because he knows what Izaya’s answer will be and he isn’t sure he can stand to hear it again. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a terrible idea, it’s the best one we’ve got to work with.”

“Oh, are you okay with it?” Shinra asks brightly, turning the full sparkle of his attention to Shizuo. “I wasn’t expecting that. If you don’t mind none of the rest of us can complain!”

Shizuo blinks. “What? What are you talking about?” He looks to Izaya in the doorway but Izaya looks just as confused if significantly more irritated than Shizuo feels. “Why does my opinion make such a difference?”

“You’re trying to get the Servamp’s attention, right?” Shinra says. “You’ll need someone to serve as bait if you want to draw him in.”

Shinra is turning to look at him. Shizuo can see the other’s head shifting, can see Shinra’s disinterested attention coming to land on his features; but it’s Izaya who looks his way first, his head turning so fast his hair shifts with the force of the movement, and it’s Izaya’s gaze that Shizuo turns to meet. Their eyes lock, red and brown holding focus for a moment, and then it’s Izaya who looks away at once, who says “ _No_ ” as fast as he can look back to Shinra. “I’ll do it myself.”

“No you won’t,” Shizuo growls from the other side of the room. “I’m going with you, you’re not going to fight this guy by yourself.”

“I’ll do it on my own,” Izaya says again, repeating the words with more emphasis and volume like that will give them greater weight. “I don’t need any of you, I can handle this on alone.”

“You can’t,” Shizuo says, ignoring the fact that Izaya isn’t looking his way and isn’t meeting his eyes. “Look what happened last time. You _need_ me, let me help you.”

“I don’t need you,” Izaya snaps, and he does look back then but it’s only to fix Shizuo with a glare, to offer the sharp edge of a scowl in the other’s direction. “I’m stronger now, I’m faster now. If I can’t fight monsters myself what’s the point of me becoming one in the first place?”

Shizuo grits his teeth, setting his jaw on the full force of all the determination he can muster. “We’re _partners_ ,” he says, feeling the words so often repeated they taste like a mantra on his tongue, like an echo of the heartbeat thudding hard against his ribs.

Izaya hisses, the sound sharp like that from an angry cat as his eyes narrow, as his hands curl to fists. “We’re _not_ ,” he snaps, shattering the words to glass shards against his teeth. “How many times do I have to tell you before you’ll _listen_? I’m a _monster_ , I’m not your partner anymore.”

“I don’t care,” Shizuo tells him, fast, before Izaya has time to get breath for another vicious attack. “I’m still _your_ partner. I don’t care what Kuzuhara said, I don’t care what you’ve become.” His fingers tense against the edge of the counter, straining against his own strength for a moment before he lets them go slack with a conscious force of will. When he looks down he can see the force trembling in his wrists, can see the white over his knuckles from the brief, bloodless force he exerted against the resistance of the counter.

“It’s my fault,” he says to the tile in front of him, growling the words downward instead of lifting his head to offer them to the room. “I should have been there to help you.” He lifts his chin, just by an inch, just enough that he can look up through the fall of his hair to fix Izaya with a scowl more for himself than for the other. “It was my fault in the first place.”

There’s silence for a moment. Izaya stares at Shizuo from across the room, his hands tight at his crossed arms and his mouth set on a line so fixed Shizuo wouldn’t be surprised if he never saw it shift again. There’s tension against Izaya’s shoulders, a strain in the line of his pale neck; Shizuo isn’t sure if it’s fury or hurt or tears the other is holding back. He isn’t sure Izaya could tell him himself. There’s just a tangle of heat behind the scarlet of his eyes, like all the barely-restrained emotion in his veins is burning itself to an open flame behind his lashes; and then Izaya looks away, turning his head to stare at the far side of the room instead of down to meet Shinra’s gaze, and Shizuo can see capitulation in the motion of his throat working on a swallow even before he speaks.

“Fine,” he says, his voice sharp and crystalline against his tongue. “Do whatever you want, I don’t care. If you want to spend your free time with a monster, I’m not going to try to stop you.”

“Does that mean we can come too?” Shinra puts in from the corner of the room, the brightness of his tone completely at odds with the tension Shizuo can feel thrumming between himself and Izaya. “You might want backup in the case of a fight. And maybe Celty can get her brother’s attention if using Shizuo as bait doesn’t work!”

“I’m not going to use _anyone_ as bait,” Izaya snaps. “I’m going to track down a monster and I’m going to kill him.” He turns towards the door, moving forward without waiting for anyone else or giving any of his audience a chance to voice a reply. “As long as I do that, I don’t care how many of you want to come with me.”

“Great!” Shinra says, and he’s pushing to his feet without waiting for more. “Come on, Celty, this should be fun!” But Shizuo is moving fastest of all, striding forward in Izaya’s wake as the other heads towards the entryway; by the time Izaya is sliding his shoes on Shizuo is right next to him, close enough to open the door and hold it while the other straightens to step past him and out into the darkness of new-fallen night.

Izaya doesn’t look back at Shizuo standing behind him any more than he waits to give Shinra and Celty time to catch up before Shizuo follows them out and locks the door behind them. But he’s walking slow, slowly enough that Shizuo has no difficulty catching up to him, and if he doesn’t move any closer to the other he also doesn’t flinch away when Shizuo falls into step alongside him.

Under the present circumstances, tolerance is the most Shizuo thinks he can hope for.


	13. Longing

They aren’t met with success.

Shizuo could have predicted that. They have nothing at all to go on, after all, other than Celty’s vague sense of the other Servamp’s habits and Izaya’s own bitter focus on his goal. If all it took were aggressive frustration alone, Shizuo is sure the vampire in question would have been waiting for them the moment they emerged from his apartment. But of course it’s not, and he’s not, and so instead they spend an unproductive evening wandering the streets of the city while Izaya’s shoulders hunch closer around his shoulders and his speech cuts off shorter and shorter with every interaction. By the end of the first hour Shizuo starts watching Izaya instead of the street, more concerned by the strain building against the curve of the other’s spine than by any hypothetical vampiric threat, and it’s Shizuo who clears his throat as the sky begins to lighten to a telltale grey at the horizon.

“We should head back,” he suggests, feeling his skin prickle with hyper-awareness of the light building in the east as if he’s the one who feels any threat from it. “It’s getting late.”

“Fine,” Izaya says, without looking back or slowing his forward stride. “Just one more street.”

“It _is_ getting pretty light,” Shinra offers, humming consideration of the approach of dawn at the horizon. “Celty will be fine even if she gets caught in it, but you’ll be in trouble if it gets much worse.”

“Shut up,” Izaya says, sounding more distracted than truly irritated. “I don’t need you all to be hovering over me.”

“Fine,” Shinra says without any rancor. “I’m going to go find a hotel to take Celty to, she really doesn’t like transforming for anyone but me to see.” He sounds more pleased about this than he should; Shizuo looks back at him just in time to see Celty swing a hand out to smack hard enough against Shinra’s shoulder to knock him stumbling off balance. He doesn’t appear at all fazed by this; if anything his smile goes wider, flashing to brilliance over his face as he burbles into a laugh. “Ow, Celty, I didn’t know you were into sadism!” Celty shakes her head, exhaustion clear in the line of her shoulders without needing the addition of words to make it clear, and she grabs at the back of Shinra’s collar without hesitating, only pausing to lift a hand in farewell towards Shizuo.

“See you later!” Shinra calls as Celty turns to tow him away down the street. “Let us know if your partner gets caught by the sun!” He sounds more entertained than concerned, his tone bright to match the edge of his smile; it makes Shizuo frown even as he’s waving farewell, and is enough to tighten his chest on sincere concern as he looks back to Izaya nearly a block away from him.

“Hey,” he calls, but Izaya doesn’t turn, either because he doesn’t hear or from the same stubborn determination to ignore everything Shizuo says until he’s forced to give it his attention. Shizuo frowns at the back of Izaya’s head and moves to follow him, dropping into a jog so he can cover the gap of distance between them. “Izaya, hey, wait up.”

“You’re the one who got distracted,” Izaya says, still without turning around. “You don’t have to follow me at all if you don’t want to, I don’t need you.”

Shizuo scowls at the back of the other’s head. “You’re going to get caught by daybreak if you keep on.” The sky is lightening further now, coming up out of the shadows and approaching the pale grey of true dawn; Shizuo glances back to the horizon, frowning at the speed with which the light is increasing before he looks back to Izaya still striding away down the street. “I thought you wanted to get your revenge on your maker.”

“I do,” Izaya says. “I will. It’s fine, there’s still plenty of time.”

“There’s _not_ ,” Shizuo snaps, and he reaches out to grab at Izaya’s shoulder to stop his forward motion. Izaya turns at once, pivoting on his heel to hiss irritation up at Shizuo behind him, but Shizuo doesn’t bother looking down to see the way anger flares Izaya’s eyes to crimson or tenses his mouth to a sharp line; his attention is all focused upward, towards the glow starting to build itself into a full-fledged threat against the horizon. “ _Look_.”

It takes a moment -- Izaya is apparently too invested in glaring at Shizuo to follow the line of the other’s pointing hand -- but he does turn his head eventually, with as much stubborn resistance as Shizuo has ever seen from him. It would be gratifying to see how rapidly his expression falls to the slack weight of surprise if Shizuo weren’t so worried.

“We have to get you inside,” Shizuo says, framing the words to the ink-black of Izaya’s lashes and the soft part of his lips as he stares at the brightening sky. Izaya blinks, his forehead creasing like he’s trying to make sense of Shizuo’s words, but he doesn’t turn to meet the other’s gaze, just goes on staring at the horizon as every second casts the porcelain-pale of his skin into clearer illumination. Shizuo exhales hard, huffing a breath of frustration at Izaya’s frozen stillness, and he pulls hard at the other’s shoulder in a desperate attempt to jolt him out of the distraction he’s fallen into. “ _Izaya_. Are you listening to me?”

Izaya blinks hard, the strange, intent focus in his eyes giving way for a moment, and when Shizuo shakes at his shoulder again he finally turns his head, his gaze coming up to meet Shizuo’s instead. He looks a little dazed, like Shizuo’s just startled him awake from an immersive dream, as if for a moment he had entirely forgotten where he is and who he’s with.

“Come on,” Shizuo says again, and pulls hard at Izaya’s shoulder to urge the other back down the street and towards the main part of the city again. “We’ll find a hotel to stay in for the day.”

“You don’t have to shove me,” Izaya protests, but he’s moving in obedience to Shizuo’s action anyway, turning to follow the guidance of the other’s hand as they retreat back towards the corner they just turned around. “I’m going, aren’t I?”

Shizuo frowns at Izaya next to him; but the other isn’t looking up at him, isn’t offering any kind of eye contact to mitigate that brief, heartstopping moment of panic Shizuo had when he saw the way Izaya was looking towards the glow of dawn.

“Whatever,” he says, capitulation coming easier than argumentation, and looks back towards the street and the illumination of interior lights spilling into the darkness like signposts for the few businesses that need to stay open through the darkest hours of the night. “As long as you’re moving.”

He doesn’t put voice to the fact that he’s never seen an expression like that on Izaya’s face before. He doesn’t want to think about how beautiful open longing looks on the familiar lines of the other’s features.


	14. Crimson

Izaya’s slower the third night out.

He was hesitant even in moving from the bed where he spent most of the day gazing steadily at the weight of the blinds pulled closed over the glow of light from the other side of the windows. Shizuo slept poorly, waking every hour or more with his heart racing on some ill-formed premonition of danger; but Izaya never so much as shut his eyes that Shizuo saw, and didn’t move from the curl he adopted over the bed when they first came in just in time for Shizuo to pull the curtains over the glow of daylight sliding over the tops of the city skyline. Shizuo thinks it’s worry that keeps him restless as much as anything else, anxiety without a clear remedy available; but Izaya doesn’t move for the whole of the day, as far as Shizuo can see, and he’s willing enough to sit up from his prone position when Shizuo turns back from the window to declare the sunlight faded from the dark of the streets outside. It’s true that he moves carefully, as if his bones are made of glass or his balance is far more uncertain than Shizuo has ever known it to be before; but he brushes aside Shizuo’s frowning worry without meeting the other’s gaze, replying to any voiced concerns with silent motion towards the room door rather than anything more coherent. Shizuo is left to huff frustration and follow him, barely sparing the time to drop off their key at the front desk before he’s back out on the streets to trail in Izaya’s wake like the human shadow he feels he’s become with the other’s turning.

Shinra and Celty catch up with them within the first mile. There’s no message on Shizuo’s phone when he checks, either confirmation or warning; but he and Izaya are just rounding a corner to one of the more major side streets when Shinra appears, the white of his lab coat glowing almost as bright as Celty’s eyes do in the dim illumination of the night.

“Izaya!” Shinra chirps, smiling wide and bright all across the whole of his face. “Shizuo! You made it!”

 _Are you alright?_ Celty offers from alongside him, her forehead creased and mouth drawn down into a far better expression of concern than the bubbling delight Shinra seems to be perpetually caught in. _Did you make it to safety for the day?_

“Obviously they did,” Shinra tells her, laughing into careless amusement. “Izaya would be a lot less alive otherwise!” He doesn’t sound particularly alarmed by this idea; at most it’s a statement of objective fact, maybe even a vaguely intriguing notion in the back of his head. “I told you they’d figure something out!”

 _You said_ probably, Celty corrects him, frowning hard at Shinra’s face as she offers her phone for him to read, but Shinra just grins and reaches to push her phone away.

“It’s fine,” he says. “Shizuo would have dragged him to safety if he had to. Wouldn’t you?” and he’s turning back to Shizuo without any warning at all, blinking wide-eyed up at the other with complete disregard for Izaya next to him. Shizuo is caught off-guard, still frowning discomfort at Shinra’s casual dismissal of the possibility of Izaya getting caught by daylight; he has to blink hard before he can recollect himself to the conversation, and has to struggle harder for coherency enough to respond.

“Yeah,” he says. “Probably.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Izaya mumbles, but the words are soft, worn dull at the edges instead of carrying the knife-sharpness they usually do. Shizuo glances at him again, feeling his expression tighten on concern as he does, but Izaya’s not meeting his gaze; he’s looking away down the street, his attention focused in the distance as if he’s entirely ignoring the conversation at hand.

“Well,” Shinra says, clapping his hands together to break the conversation free of its topic. “No time like the present. Shall we continue on in our hapless search?”

“Sure,” Shizuo says, speaking for them both, and Izaya moves without hesitating or offering protest to this casual dominance. Shizuo’s frown deepens, forming itself around the weight of concern this time instead of irritation; but Izaya doesn’t look back, and Shizuo is left to follow in the other’s wake with his worry silent but heavy.

They travel slowly. Shizuo thinks, at first, that it’s some kind of thoughtfulness, that Izaya has gotten tired of his game of trying to outpace the other three in pursuit of his solitary goal; but he’s not making any attempt at conversation, he still appears just as unwilling to acknowledge the existence of the others following behind him. Nothing is different about the day before; except that Izaya’s movements are dragging, his actions heavy, the pace of his footsteps coming slower with every block they travel. Shizuo wonders if he’s not reading more into it than there is, if he isn’t seeing things that have more to do with uncertainty than something worse; Celty and Shinra don’t seem to notice anything wrong, anyway, or at least not enough to comment on it. But the farther they travel the more sure Shizuo is that some energy is absent from Izaya’s footsteps, that some exuberance is lacking in his motion, and he’s just making up his mind to ask about it when Izaya misses a step. His foot catches at the sidewalk, his balance lurches forward; he has to throw an arm out against the wall next to him to catch his stability back, and then Shizuo is stepping in, is grabbing at Izaya’s elbow to steady his balance as he hisses concern so sharp and sudden it goes incoherent on his tongue.

“What’s wrong?” he blurts, the words coming from his lips with panicked speed built up over the last several blocks of budding concern. “Izaya, what’s wrong with you?”

“Get off me,” Izaya says, twisting his arm in Shizuo’s hold like he’s trying to throw the other off, although the movement is so laughably weak it feels more for show than for anything else. “Nothing’s wrong with me, I tripped.”

“You didn’t _trip_ ,” Shizuo tells him. “I’ve never seen you trip before, you never so much as lose your balance. Something’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Izaya says, and then he pushes himself to upright off the wall and tries to take another step forward. It’s an admirable attempt -- his expression is very nearly level, his gaze almost perfectly steady -- but he’s only just rocking his weight forward when his knee gives way entirely and his entire body collapses as if his consciousness has evaporated.

“ _Izaya_ ,” Shizuo gasps, panic stealing his breathing clear out of his chest, and he’s grabbing for the other’s far arm as fast as Izaya falls, catching the weight of the other’s body in his hold as Izaya starts to drop to the pavement under them. Izaya hisses against his shoulder, his fingers bracing at Shizuo’s shirt; Shizuo can’t tell if it’s meant to be a shove to urge him away or an attempt at supporting himself as they collapse in slow-motion to the sidewalk. It hardly makes a difference; he can feel the whole of Izaya’s weight against the support of his hands, he’s not going to let go and leave the other to fall.

“Fuck,” he blurts as they land at the sidewalk. Shizuo’s knees scrape painfully against the rough surface but he ignores the ache as unimportant. “Talk to me, what’s wrong?” Izaya hisses something incoherent and shoves hard against Shizuo’s shoulder; the force is weak, barely enough to urge himself back, and when he leans away it’s only to collapse against the side of the building behind him, to let the brick front take the burden of his weight instead of Shizuo. He looks awful as his head falls back against the support behind him, paler even than it did when they left the hotel and with his lips stained to saturated scarlet until they look nearly bloody with the color rising to them; his cheekbones are clear under his skin, his collarbones so sharply defined Shizuo can see them through the weight of his shirt. When he shifts his hand at Shizuo’s shoulder the tendons in his wrist are near enough to the surface that Shizuo can see them flex with the strengthless effort to urge him away.

“What’s _wrong_?” Shizuo demands again, looking up to Shinra and Celty for more guidance than the non-response Izaya is giving him. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Fascinating,” Shinra hums, his attention fixed on Izaya’s face as he tips his head to the side as if he’s considering some kind of uncommon occurrence. “Does this happen to all subclasses, Celty?”

“ _What_ ,” Shizuo growls, biting off the words to sharp edges in the back of his throat as he glares at Shinra. “What’s _wrong_?”

Celty’s the one to respond. She huffs a voiceless exhale, her shoulders slumping with exhausted resignation, and she steps forward from her usual position just over Shinra’s shoulder, reaching out to swing her arm wide and push the other back while she types with one hand into her phone. It only takes her a moment; then she’s stepping in close and turning her phone around to offer the screen for Shizuo’s consideration.

 _He needs to eat_.

“Eat?” Shizuo repeats, feeling his forehead crease on confusion. “But isn’t he a vampire, he doesn’t need…” and then his awareness catches up, his eyes go wide with understanding, and he huffs an exhale of realization as he turns to look back to Izaya leaning against the wall.

“No,” Izaya says without waiting for Shizuo to even say anything. He has his head tipped back, has his eyes closed tight; his forehead is creased, his mouth weighting into a frown so tense his face is showing all the lines of it. “I _won’t_.” He shakes his head, pressing his lips together tight as if to hide the brilliant white of his teeth and the implication of the sharp edges of the canines threatening the edge of his lips.

There’s a touch at Shizuo’s shoulder, the weight of fingers to get his attention again. _He has to_. Celty turns the phone back around, types out another quick sequence of letters. _He won’t be able to move otherwise_.

“You can’t fight like this,” Shizuo says, looking away from Celty’s offered information and back to Izaya still sitting with his whole weight pressed against the wall at his back and his eyes closed tight as if to block out the reality of the moment. “You have to drink something. You can’t even stand, can you?”

“I’m fine,” Izaya says, his voice raw like he can deny reality if he just tries hard enough. “I’m not going to become a _monster_.”

“You’re _not_ ,” Shizuo growls, feeling his ever-fragile patience giving way to the pressure of frustration in his chest. “I thought you wanted to _hunt_ monsters, you can’t do that like this, can you?” He looks down to consider the cuffs of his sleeves pinned close against his skin; he reaches for the buttons holding them tight and urges them free of the fabric so he can roll up the cloth and bare his left arm. “Just drink a little, just until you can walk again.” He holds his wrist out, making an offering of the bare skin of his forearm; Izaya’s lashes flutter open, his gaze catching to drag across the line of Shizuo’s arm, but he turns his head away, pressing his lips tight together over his teeth even as his eyes flare to crimson for a heartbeat’s worth of time. Shizuo breathes out hard through his nose, feeling frustration crystallize into sincere anger in his chest as he keeps holding his arm out, as Izaya keeps his head turned away in blatant rejection.

“Come _on_ ,” Shizuo snaps. “I’m _offering_. I _want_ you to. It’s not like you’re taking advantage of me if I’m asking you to.”

“I don’t want to,” Izaya says past teeth gritted so hard Shizuo can almost hear the creak of pressure against them. “I _won’t_.”

Celty shifts at Shizuo’s shoulder; when Shizuo looks up at her her head is ducked over her phone, her fingers shifting over the keys as she types. When she offers the screen it’s angled for Izaya, the tilt of her wrist making the intended audience clear, but it’s not far enough to the side to keep the glow of the backlit letters from Shizuo’s gaze, and he’s reading over them before he can catch himself.

 _You’ll die if you don’t_.

“Fuck,” Shizuo snaps, and he’s turning away from Celty’s phone and Shinra’s intrigued smile and back, to Izaya slumped with such all-encompassing exhaustion against the wall that he can’t even hold his hands up from the slack fall they’ve made at his sides. “I can’t believe this” and he’s reaching out, fumbling into the pocket of Izaya’s coat while Izaya hisses protest and tries to lift his hand to push Shizuo away. The movement takes visible effort, his whole arm shakes under its own weight, and when he shoves at Shizuo’s wrist Shizuo ignores the weak force entirely as he closes his fingers around the handle of the switchblade in the other’s pocket to draw it free.

“This is stupid,” he says, and slides the blade open to lock into place as he braces his fingers at the handle. “You’re terrible at keeping yourself alive, you know that?” Izaya huffs an exhale as he realizes what Shizuo intends, his eyes going wider as he reaches to struggle for a hold at the knife; but Shizuo is moving faster than Izaya can react, drawing the razor edge of the blade across his arm before he can flinch away from the hurt. There’s a shift of pressure, the cool of the metal pressing against skin; the blade is sharp, Shizuo doesn’t even feel the hurt until after the cut across his arm has started to ooze blood and he’s wiping the blade clean against his pants before closing it again.

“Here,” he says, and he’s holding his arm out towards Izaya, making an offering of his torn skin even before he lifts his gaze to meet the scarlet shading behind the other’s lashes. Izaya looks agonized, as if Shizuo had pressed the knife to his own throat instead of using it to break open his skin. “I’ll lose the blood anyway like this, you might as well make some use of it.”

Izaya stares at Shizuo for a moment, his jaw tensing and working over stress. Shizuo can’t get any kind of a read from the shadows behind Izaya’s eyes, can’t pin down any element of the other’s reaction from his expression; finally Izaya takes a breath, deliberately long and drawling, and opens his mouth to speak.

“I really hate you, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo can feel his shoulders drop into relief, can feel the pressure of panic inside his chest give way at the surrender implicit in the futile viciousness of those words. “Yeah,” he says, and holds his arm out for Izaya’s shaking hands to close and steady against as the other drags himself up from the wall and ducks his head in over the cut bleeding sluggishly over Shizuo’s wrist. “I know you do.”

Izaya’s mouth feels warm against Shizuo’s skin.


	15. Ache

It’s better after that. Izaya recovers faster than Shizuo thought possible; by the time he’s pushing Shizuo’s slow-bleeding wrist away to wipe hard against the damp at his mouth there’s something like the appearance of health in his expression again, some measure of color back under the pale of his cheeks. His mouth is still stained red, his eyes are still brilliant in the night until Shizuo can’t imagine anyone mistaking him for human even at a glance; but he draws his hood up over his head, and ducks his chin down to cast his face to shadow, and if Shizuo can’t keep his eyes off him the few late-night wanderers they pass don’t care enough to spare the four of them more than a glance. Shinra’s lab coat draws as much attention as Izaya, the more with the elegant shadow Celty makes just at his arm; Shizuo is left to fret about Izaya undisturbed and almost unnoticed by those strangers they walk past. So they’re left to crosshatch the city in peace, with Izaya’s footsteps guiding them through what Shizuo suspects to be more a random pattern than a deliberate one. He doesn’t protest. It’s not like he has a better idea, after all, and under the circumstances he’d prefer they have a quiet night, at least for now.

“We’re not making any progress,” Shinra observes as the darkness settles into the heavy weight that comes just before the start of dawn, as if the night is making a last great stand against the forces of daybreak. “Are you really planning to just wander the city until you stumble across him?”

“No,” Izaya says from the front of their little group, where he’s been taking the lead with the shadowy weight of his hood drawn up over his hair to serve as a beacon for the others to follow. “He’ll come looking for me eventually.”

Shinra’s laugh is bright and fizzing like champagne against the walls of the buildings around them. “How do you know? Maybe he just turned you and abandoned you to whatever fate you might find for yourself. There’s no particular reason he would care about you.”

“Because he turned me.” Izaya takes another turning, pivoting hard on his heel to take a sharp left. Shizuo almost stumbles before he can catch his balance enough to follow. “He could have left me to die there, or he could have killed Shizu-chan too and removed any threat C3 could pose to him.” He sounds distant, cold, like he’s laying out the moves of a game instead of talking about his own life, about Shizuo’s continued existence, about their completely ineffective power when placed against the Servamp in question. “But he turned me instead.”

“So you think he has some kind of attachment to you?” Shinra wants to know. He sounds fascinated, like he’s struggling to get a grasp on the concept, as if the very idea of a lingering emotional commitment is too foreign for him to hold onto. “Just because he made you a vampire?”

“No,” Izaya says, his voice sharp and clear in the way it used to be, just for a moment, like he’s found his edge again in the midst of irritation with Shinra’s incorrect assumption. “Because he wanted to make me suffer.” He’s walking faster, hitting the pavement hard with every step he takes; Shizuo can hear the _smack_ of his shoes landing at the sidewalk, can hear the decisive certainty behind each step. “And he’ll want to see it himself.”

“How do you know that?” Shizuo asks, frowning hard at the back of Izaya’s coat. “Do you have some kind of connection to him?”

Izaya’s laugh has no trace of humor anywhere in it. It’s just a sharp edge, an unsheathed blade flickering in sunlight; when he turns his head it’s to offer a tug at the corner of his mouth to go with it, to let his gaze glow at Shizuo for a moment. “That’s not how I know,” he says, and he’s looking forward again, pulling away from that momentary eye contact to offer just his shoulders to Shizuo’s gaze again. “I know because that’s what I would do in his position.”

They fall back to silence after that. There’s nothing Shizuo can offer to follow up Izaya’s casual declaration, and Shinra doesn’t seem to care about filling the quiet; they’re left to pace out the streets in silence, the minutes slipping away into hours until the sky is lightening to grey to insist on the conclusion of another night of fruitless searching. It’s Shinra who calls them to a halt by the expedience of stopping dead in the middle of the sidewalk and clearing his throat with unnecessary volume.

“Well, we’re off,” he declares, looking to Celty beside him with the same melting-soft smile he always turns on her, the one that makes him look like a completely different person for a moment. Celty glances at him, her mouth working on some almost-repressed affection, and Shinra looks back to the other two with his whole face as bright as if Celty’s attention was enough sunlight to bring him fully into the day. “Are you going to play chicken with the sunrise or take shelter somewhere?”

“We’ll get a hotel,” Shizuo says. “Or head back to my place, maybe.”

“We can’t go back to your place,” Izaya says from a few steps farther along the sidewalk, where he’s moved to look around the corner of the next street. He sounds bored, utterly disinterested in the topic at hand; his inspection of the street in front of him is only barely more focused. “C3 must be looking for me, your apartment will be the first place they check.”

Shizuo glances back at Izaya, frowning at the back of the other’s coat, but Izaya doesn’t look back at him to so much as acknowledge his reaction. “A hotel, then,” he says, and this is met with the silence that is the closest thing to agreement he can hope to get at this point. He looks back to Shinra and Celty. “We’ll meet up with you at sundown.”

“Okay!” Shinra says, lifting a hand into a wave as energetic as it is careless. “See you later!” And he’s turning away, making as if to cut across the street regardless of the crosswalk a few feet down before Celty seizes his arm and drags him bodily in the direction of the white lines marking out the asphalt. Shinra laughs, his tone more charmed than irritated, and Shizuo turns away before he’s seen Shinra look up to beam affection at Celty, his attention already turning back to Izaya as the other two move away.

Shizuo had been afraid Izaya would resist retreating to the shadows of a hotel room, was worried he was about to embark on another near-miss with daylight as they had the day before. But Izaya is waiting for him, has turned back to look over his shoulder at Shizuo behind him, and as Shizuo turns to meet his gaze he says “Where are we going?” without any particular resistance on the words at all. He sounds submissive, like he’s surrendering to Shizuo’s will before he even knows what it is, and Shizuo doesn’t know what the cause for the other’s shift in perspective is but it’s enough to ease the strain of worry across his shoulders all the same.

“I know a place nearby,” he says. “Come with me.” And he takes the lead, and Izaya follows, falling into step over Shizuo’s shoulder as if he belongs there, as if he’s spent his whole life walking in step just at the other’s elbow. It feels familiar, an echo of the way they used to be, when Izaya used a sharp edge to mark out the line of his grin instead of the weight of a scowl and when his eyes looked like ink in the shadows instead of glowing with a faint, surreal light. Izaya’s different now, Shizuo knows -- it’s impossible to forget, with all his features drawn into a little more clarity, a little more perfection even than they held before -- but this is the same, at least, this fit of his footsteps falling in harmony with the pace of Izaya’s, this quiet coexistence between them as they walk through the night-dark streets of the city, of their city. It’s reassuring, a comfort greater than Shizuo can frame to words, and he’s still caught in it when they make their way to the hotel they’ll stay in through the daylight hours after dawn. The conversation with the front desk is perfunctory, as minimal as both of them can make it, and in a very few minutes Shizuo is turning back with a key in hand and a number handwritten on the card to go with it. Izaya reaches for the card without asking; Shizuo lets it go without protest, shifting to follow Izaya’s lead down the hall rather than reading the placards with the room numbers for himself.

Izaya doesn’t turn the light on as they come in the door, and Shizuo doesn’t reach for the switch. The heavy curtains are pulled open over the window; the faint grey lighting they leave in the room is more than enough to see by, at least for Shizuo to toe his shoes off and toss the key towards the desk while Izaya shrugs out of his coat. It’s Shizuo who moves towards the window, and Izaya who makes for the bed; he’s climbing over the neatly made sheets before Shizuo has dragged the weight of the curtains shut to block out the steady advance of daylight into the room. With them drawn the space is far darker, nearly black for the first moment of time; but then Shizuo blinks, and his vision shifts, and by the time he’s turning back around he can see the shape of Izaya sitting at the edge of the bed with his hands slack at his sides and his knees angled open in front of him. He’s not watching Shizuo; he doesn’t appear to be watching anything at all as much as staring blankly across the distance of the room while he waits for time to pass. It’s as if he’s turned himself off, like the press of daylight against the horizon is a switch to sap all the energy from his body; Shizuo can feel the pressure of the thought settle in against his chest like a knot, like a force determined to steal his breathing and catch desperate against his pulse. He stares at Izaya for a moment, feeling the scabbed-over skin at his arm ache with a faint, distant hurt; and finally he speaks, without giving any warning beyond the weight of his attention on Izaya sitting at the bed.

“Are you going to do it yourself this time, or am I going to have to cut myself again?”

Izaya’s head turns at once. The movement is whip-quick, an action with startling speed, and then he’s staring at Shizuo, his eyes incandescent in the dark of the room. It’s impossible to see the detail of his jaw flexing, of his lips pressing tight together; but Shizuo can imagine the shift of the other’s expression, he doesn’t have to see the specifics to know what Izaya’s reaction is. For a moment uncertainty hangs in the air, like a dare forming tension in the gap between them; and then Izaya lifts a hand, the rustle of his clothes shifting loud in the space, and Shizuo is moving before Izaya beckons him in closer, his feet moving him forward in immediate, reflexive response to the other’s gesture as quickly as he anticipates it.

The bed is soft under his knees. The mattress gives more to the burden of Shizuo’s weight than it did for Izaya’s; it’s enough to threaten the other’s balance, to shift him precariously over the sheets, but Izaya doesn’t even blink at the movement, doesn’t give voice to any kind of protest. His attention is dropping, his gaze catching to cling against Shizuo’s arm instead of the other’s face, and he’s reaching out before Shizuo has yet reached for the buttons at his cuff, as if he’s anxious to demonstrate immediately how willing he is to submit. His fingers brace at Shizuo’s elbow, his grip tightening to pin the thin of the other’s shirt against his skin, and under Shizuo’s touch the cuff loosens, the fabric falling open over the line of red marking out Shizuo’s earlier self-inflicted injury. He catches at the cloth, dragging it up and off his forearm to leave the skin bare, and Izaya ducks in over him without hesitating, lowering his head so the dark of his hair falls forward over the lines of his face. Shizuo can’t see his expression, can’t see any of the other’s skin at all except for the pale stripe bared by the weight of his hair sliding forward off the back of his neck; but Izaya’s exhaling against his skin, his breath far cooler than Shizuo expects it to be, and then his mouth is pressing to Shizuo’s skin, and Shizuo has to let his own breath rush out of him while he tries to find a rhythm for the rushing pace of his heart in his chest.

It shouldn’t feel so different. Izaya drank his blood earlier, in the dark shadows of the street where he first collapsed; his mouth had fit flush against Shizuo’s skin then too, the press of his lips had caught the trickle of blood oozing from the cut of the knife, this is hardly anything different. But it is, regardless of what it should be, because Izaya’s lips are shifting at Shizuo’s skin, settling in against the line of his arm like he’s fitting himself against Shizuo, and when his jaw shifts Shizuo can feel premonition shudder all down the line of his spine with awareness of what’s about to happen. There’s pressure against his skin, the weight of teeth catching friction just against his arm; and then a shift, surrender as Shizuo’s skin gives way to the razor edge of Izaya’s teeth pressing against him. It doesn’t even hurt; the points are too sharp, too perfectly calibrated to do exactly this, and then Izaya sucks against the press of his lips to Shizuo’s skin and Shizuo would swear he can feel the sensation run all down the length of his spine, would swear the heat that spills out into his veins is enough to set him to glow as brightly as the flicker of Izaya’s newly inhuman eyes. He can feel the shift of liquid under his skin, can feel the draw of his blood spilling to collect against Izaya’s teeth and the demand of his lips, and for a moment he can’t think at all for the heady rush of it, for the brilliant awareness of blood spilling from his veins to fill Izaya’s with borrowed life. His throat tenses, his cheeks glow to heat, and when he shifts it’s reflexive, automatic, a tip of his shoulders to press closer against Izaya next to him.

Izaya doesn’t protest. Izaya doesn’t move at all, even when the angle of Shizuo’s chest runs up against the sharp edge of his shoulder; he just keeps his mouth to Shizuo’s arm, keeps his fingers bracing the other to stillness, and Shizuo has to shut his eyes, has to duck his head to the radiance he can feel surging up the whole of his arm from the contact of Izaya’s mouth at his skin. It feels like sunlight, feels like fire, like the glow of an open flame in the dead of winter; all Shizuo’s blood is stirring to life, he would swear he can feel every thud of his heart in his chest echoing against the inside of his thoughts. He can smell the metallic edge of Izaya’s hair close against his mouth, can breathe in and catch something almost like sugar on his tongue; he’s never seen anything in his life as erotic as the dip of Izaya’s neck against the loose edge of his shirt, has never wanted anything as much as he wants to press his lips against that bare skin to feel the heat of his blood sliding through Izaya’s veins. He barely even notices that he’s hard, that his cock is aching with formless want against the front of his pants; it seems like a logical conclusion, an inescapable result of the way it feels to have Izaya drawing blood from his veins with every shift of his throat. He wants to get closer, wants to curl his free arm around the dip of Izaya’s waist and turn his head in to press his nose close against Izaya’s hair, wants to breathe in the whispering scent of the other’s skin into his lungs as Izaya is pulling Shizuo’s blood into his body; and then Izaya shoves at his arm, pulling his mouth away so quickly Shizuo doesn’t even have time to whimper into a protest, and by the time Shizuo is blinking the heat-stunned distraction from his eyes Izaya is turning away, giving Shizuo the line of his shoulders instead of the telltale expression across his face as he slides away over the bed and moves to lie across the sheets instead of sitting atop them. Shizuo is left with his heart racing in his chest, with his blood shivering in his veins with the desire to go elsewhere and no remaining option, and with the quick-curdling weight of guilt low in his stomach for his obvious and totally inappropriate reaction.

“Izaya,” he tries, testing the weight of words at his lips as he reaches out for the angle of the other’s shoulder. His wrist feels cold with the absence of Izaya’s touch; there’s a thin trickle of blood from one of the pair of puncture wounds, but even that is congealing as quickly as it winds across his skin. “Izaya?”

“Be quiet, Shizu-chan,” Izaya says without looking back or moving at all from where he’s lying still across the smooth of the sheets. “Some of us are trying to sleep.”

Shizuo stares at him for a long moment. Izaya’s hair is falling against the pillow, now, the dark of it looking like an ink spill in the dim of the room; the curve of his neck is still bare for Shizuo’s gaze, the tension across his shoulders still drawing the line of it into a smooth arc. Shizuo traces the pale curve with his eyes like he’s trying to memorize its shape, as if the weight of his gaze will give him back that surging heat he had running through him like flame for a few brief seconds; and then he turns away, sliding away from Izaya and off the edge of the bed so he can sit at the floor facing the window instead of watching the strain of the other’s body as he doesn’t sleep.

Even when Shizuo’s blood has lost the last of its borrowed heat, his fingertips still ache for the friction of Izaya’s skin.


	16. Suspicion

The next night begins calmly enough.

Izaya stirs with the last glimmer of the sun sinking below the horizon, pushing to sit up from the motionless curl he’s been maintaining over the bed for the whole of the daylight hours. He didn’t move at all after he laid down; without the need for air and with his heartbeat still in his chest he’s uncannily still, as if he’s trying to attain the appearance of the death he insists is all he deserves. It makes Shizuo’s chest ache, makes his heart hurt with a formless desire to help, to comfort, to offer _something_ to ease the obvious pain of the other’s existence; but he doesn’t know what to do, and doesn’t know if Izaya would let him offer any help even if he had some idea of what would be better, so he stays quiet, drifting through unformed dreams and hazy nightmares until his body refuses to sleep any longer and leaves him lying still and quiet on the floor of the hotel room while he watches the glow of sunlight fade to sunset gold and orange before finally flickering and dying completely. Shizuo sees the last rays of light vanish from the edges of the curtain covering the window, watches the light evaporate into the weight of nightfall, and Izaya moves as if on a cue, shifting across the creaky mattress of the bed and pushing himself to upright in a single movement. He doesn’t say anything by way of greeting or suggestion; he just sits there, waiting in silence until Shizuo gets up and he can push to his feet to follow the other towards the door. They check out quickly, with the speed that is rapidly become routine over the last few days of repetition, and Shinra and Celty are waiting for them out on the main street, Shinra beaming and not at all forthcoming about how they determined which hotel the other two were staying in. Shizuo assumes another tracking shadow or something similar, but he doesn’t protest, and Izaya just falls back into stride down the sidewalk and leaves the rest of them to follow.

Shizuo doesn’t expect anything shocking to occur. This is the third night in a row of fruitless searching; Izaya’s insistence notwithstanding, there are some doubts in his own mind that they’ll find the Servamp in question, that Izaya will be able to attain the revenge that is so motivating him. But every day that passes with Izaya quiet is another day when Izaya isn’t trying to step into the danger of direct sunlight, and every night that passes is another span of time for him to adjust to the sense of his new existence, to come to terms with the change in his life that hasn’t fundamentally changed any aspect of who he is to Shizuo’s eyes. Shizuo doesn’t know if time alone will be enough to unknot the weight of the self-loathing Izaya is carrying as close against him as a favorite shirt, but he has no intention of going anywhere; if it takes years before Izaya is ready to face the night with as much energy as he once faced the day, Shizuo will wait out the whole span of them and be grateful for the second chance they offer.

He’s thinking about that, winding out the days ahead of them into weeks, months, maybe years of slow improvement, of long days and warm nights, until his imagination is spiraling out a whole lifetime for him, until he’s caught more by his own fantasy than by the immediacy of reality around him. Izaya is leading the way, carrying them along the street with his usual steady intent, behind Shizuo Shinra is murmuring something soft and affectionate to Celty; and then Izaya stops dead, his feet stilling so abruptly Shizuo nearly runs into him before he parses the tension along the other’s shoulders and the sudden attention in every line of his body.

“Who’s there?” Izaya calls, his voice sharp as a threat and echoing against the dark of the quiet street. For a moment there’s no response, either in sound or movement; and then a shadow separates from the side of a building, a pair of bright eyes comes into view, and a woman Shizuo has never seen before offers the four of them a smile that bares the sharp edges of her teeth while coming nowhere near her eyes.

“Nice little group you have here,” she says, drawling over the words until they’re a mockery of sincerity. “Are you still playing at being vampire hunters? That seems a bit misguided, with half your group being…” Her gaze drags over Izaya, marking out the details of his existence before jumping back up to his face as her smile pulls wider. “What you are.”

“Who are you?” Izaya repeats, his voice still flat and hard on the edge that came with his first question. If the stranger’s jab hit home there’s no sign of it that Shizuo can see from his angle behind the other. “What are you here for?”

“I’m like you,” the woman says, angling her hip out so she can brace a hand against it in a position Shizuo is very sure carries only the appearance of distraction and not the fact of it. “Your sister, of sorts.”

“You’re one of his subclasses,” Izaya says, and his voice isn’t calm now; it’s dropped over a ledge into ice, has picked up a level of chill enough to steal living heat into frostbitten cold. “Where is he?”

The woman laughs, her amusement as put-upon as her smile. “As if I would just give you that information,” she says. “What are you going to offer me in return?” Her gaze slides off Izaya and to the side, to land on Shizuo standing just behind him; her focus is considering, as if she’s tallying up Shizuo’s value as an object more than seeing the awareness in the glare he’s giving her. “Are you going to give up your pet over there?”

“He’s not my pet.” Izaya’s answer comes instantly, so fast Shizuo wonders if he even had time to think about it, if it wasn’t as much reflex at his tongue as anything else.

The subclass looks back to him and raises an eyebrow. “No? He’s a human trailing around with a subclass, a Servamp, and an Eve. What good is he serving you except as a convenient snack?” Shizuo’s skin prickles with the reminder of the night before, of the dark of the hotel room pressing close around him as Izaya’s teeth bled fire into his veins in place of the blood the other was draining from him; when he shifts it’s to close his fingers around his wrist, to press his palm in tight against the dull ache of the healing knife cut and the puncture wounds he can barely feel anymore at all for how rapidly the skin around them has closed. Izaya doesn’t turn to look at him at all. “You could kill him in a heartbeat if you decided to, you know. Does he know yet how outclassed he is?”

“We’re not talking about Shizuo,” Izaya says, his voice as cold as winter ice and twice as brittle. “We’re talking about the Servamp that turned us.”

“Are we?” the other subclass taunts. “Why, because you say so?”

“Yes,” Izaya says. “Tell me where he is.”

The subclass tips her head back, turns her chin up to make a mockery of the smile she offers them. “Make me.”

There’s a pause, a moment of silence that Shizuo can feel drawing taut in the darkened space of the street. Behind him Shinra and Celty are absolutely still; he thinks neither of them have moved at all since the other subclass appeared. The stranger is still watching Izaya, her head tipped to the side and her mouth dragging at that lopsided smile, and Izaya is standing perfectly still, his shoulders so tense under the line of his coat that Shizuo can see the strain even from behind him. The moment lengthens, strains, pulls taut in the air around them; and then “Fine” Izaya says, and everything happens too fast for Shizuo to track. One moment Izaya is standing still in front of him, close enough for Shizuo to reach out and grab at the sleeve of his coat with a single step; the next he’s moving, lunging forward with such speed that for the first heartbeat of time Shizuo is left blinking at empty space. The other subclass’s head comes down, her eyes go wide with the first shock of reaction; and Izaya’s behind her, moving so fast she barely has time to lift a hand before he’s closing his fingers against her wrist and dragging to pull it up and around her back. Shizuo didn’t know Izaya was that strong, _did_ know that he’s never been so preternaturally fast; but he’s moving so fast the fight is over before it’s begun, his hold on the other subclass’s wrist enough to force her stumbling down to her knees on the pavement while Shizuo is still in the middle of his first step forward. There’s a startled inhale from behind Shizuo, a murmur of “Impressive!” in Shinra’s usual cheerful tone; but in front of them Izaya is dropping to a knee behind the other subclass, his shoulder flexing with the effort of holding her still and his other hand pressing in against the curve of her back.

“Tell me,” he says, his voice low but hissing over an edge that carries his words clearly to where Shizuo is standing frozen still with shock at the sudden shift in situation. “Or I’ll stake you and leave you for the sun.”

The subclass scoffs. “You wouldn’t,” she manages, though the words are straining over the back of her throat and Shizuo can see the pain of her position written clearly across her face. “I’m as good as your sibling, you would never.”

“I would,” Izaya says, and the subclass might still look skeptical but Shizuo’s whole spine prickles with awareness of the sincerity on those words, with acknowledgment of the absolute certainty that Izaya is pressing into the shape of them. “Where is he?”

“Watching you,” comes the answer, dragging on a taunt but still quick enough to satisfy the strain Shizuo can see pressing against the angle of Izaya’s jaw and the line of his neck. “He’s been watching you for days, now. Nice of your _partner_ to take such good care of you, he’s almost as devoted as an Eve would be.” Her last word hisses in the back of her throat, strained almost out of audibility as her spine arches, her whole body curving away from whatever Izaya is pressing in against her back; Shizuo can’t see the shape of the weapon, but he has a good idea of what it is offering such a sharp pressure against the subclass’s spine.

“Watching me,” Izaya repeats, and his head tips up, his gaze scanning the sides of the buildings around them. They stretch towards the sky, their heights too great to allow a clear view of the tops, their windows too dark to grant a glimpse of any darkened figures inside; Shizuo can see Izaya’s jaw flex on frustration, can see strain work against the set of the other’s lips as he looks. “Is he watching now?”

“Probably,” the subclass spits. “Stake me all you want, he’ll just come rescue me as soon as you leave. Unless you plan to wait with me and take your chances with the dawn?”

Izaya’s head comes down, his gaze drops to the back of the other subclass’s head. “No,” he says. “I don’t” and he’s moving with that same impossible speed, the hand he had pressing to the other’s back pulling away and around instead. There’s a glint of light, moonlight flashing off the edge of metal instead of the point of the stake he had threatened, and the subclass’s eyes go wide, her mouth opens on shock forced to silence by the drag of Izaya’s knife across her throat. Shizuo shouts something incoherent, stepping in with a too-late reaction to reach to catch Izaya’s hand to stillness; but the subclass is going slack already, her eyes glazing over as the borrowed blood in her veins spills to soak through the front of her shirt. Izaya lets his hold on her arm go as she falls, lets her drop to the ground in front of them; his hand at his side is slack, unresisting even when Shizuo reaches to grab at his wrist and wrench the knife free of his hold.

“It’s fine,” Izaya says, his voice strange and distant as he looks down at the subclass in front of him, his gaze fixed on the pool of blood spreading out to stain the cracks in the pavement underneath them. “It’s just another monster.” He huffs a laugh that doesn’t touch his eyes, that barely flickers over his features before it gives way to a blank stare at the form of the other vampire fallen in front of him. “It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve killed one of them.” His head comes up, his gaze sliding over the sides of the buildings around them; his mouth shifts, his jaw forming onto tension as he looks at the darkened windows stretching up towards the sky overhead. “It won’t be the last time, either.”

Shizuo doesn’t know what to say. The handle of the knife is cold against his hand; he tosses it aside, lets it skid across the sidewalk and out of reach of them both, but Izaya no more turns to watch it than he reacts when Shizuo reaches out to catch his arm around the other’s shoulders and pull him in against him. Izaya tips forward, his weight falling heavy and passive against Shizuo’s chest, and Shizuo holds him there without letting his grip ease even as the body of the fallen subclass starts to shift and disintegrate into powdery dust to catch and flutter away in the night breeze.

Shizuo doesn’t look to see if Izaya is still looking up at the buildings. He doesn’t want to confirm what he already suspects to be true.


	17. Evidence

Izaya moves, after a while. Shizuo’s heart is still pounding in his chest, his breathing still rushing fast on horror and disbelief in equal measure when Izaya gets his hand against Shizuo’s chest and shoves hard enough to force the other away regardless of his own intention to hold on or let go either one. Shizuo loses his grip, falling back against the pavement as his balance goes, and in front of him Izaya is getting to his feet, his shoulders heavy as with some unseen burden and his head ducked down so Shizuo can’t see his expression. He moves deliberately to collect his fallen knife, to wipe it clean against the edge of his pants before closing it and replacing it in his pocket. Shizuo is watching with absolute focus, ready to fling himself forward with speed desperate enough to match whatever supernatural power Izaya is currently master of if needed, but Izaya doesn’t make the least move towards pressing the edge of the blade to his own skin, just folds the knife back to closed and puts it away before moving to continue down the sidewalk.

For a moment he’s walking alone, the sound of his footsteps ringing unmatched against the dark silence of the night around them; and then Celty takes a breath, and Shinra hums a note of interested appreciation, and they both move forward, stepping around where Shizuo is still sitting on the pavement where Izaya pushed him. Shinra glances at him before looking away again, his attention clearly holding more to Izaya than Shizuo; Celty’s focus lingers longer, her mouth pulling down onto a frown of concern as she considers him. Shizuo thinks she might offer him a hand to pull him to his feet in a moment; but he’s moving unassisted, pushing himself upright with more force than grace and stepping forward to follow in Izaya’s wake. Celty steps aside to let him take the lead, her hold on Shinra’s arm enough to hold the other to stillness, and Shizuo falls back into pace with Izaya, fixing the other’s shoulders with dark-shadowed focus as if it’s likely to have the least effect on Izaya’s actions or lack thereof either one.

It doesn’t. They wander the streets in silence, without any dramatics more than what they’ve already encountered for the day, and when Izaya finally draws to a stop it’s before even Shizuo has begun to eye the horizon for the approach of dawn.

“I won’t have any more luck tonight,” he says, for all the world as if he knows this, as if he can verify it, as if the question of his creator’s whims is a matter of clear understanding to him. “Find a hotel for us, Shizu-chan.” Shizuo would be offended by this casual demand at Izaya’s lips -- it’s not as if he’s any better suited to locating a place for them to spend the daylight than Izaya himself -- but there’s a strange tone in the back of Izaya’s throat, something like the very start of stress forming against his voice. Shizuo frowns at the back of his head, turning over the possibility of commenting on this particular evidence of strain; but then Shinra says “I know a place nearby!” and takes the lead down the street with Celty trailing behind him. Izaya turns to follow without waiting for Shizuo’s protest or agreement either one, and Shizuo is left to follow or be left behind entirely.

It’s a nice place Shinra takes them to. Shizuo thinks about protesting the expense of staying even for the single night they’ll be present; he hasn’t had much occasion to spend his accumulated paychecks from C3 before now, but he has no source of income in the foreseeable future, and the nightly stays in hotels are beginning to take on the form of a burden with each night. But Shinra asks for two rooms without hesitating at all, and pays for them as immediately, and when Shizuo starts to protest Shinra laughs him off without even giving him a chance to finish putting voice to his complaint.

“No, no, we’re all in this adventure together!” he says, like the process of hunting down Celty’s vampiric sibling and Izaya’s killer and creator in one is some kind of wacky movie plot instead of weighted with all the concern and rising uncertainty Shizuo is able to muster. “You don’t need to worry about it for tonight this way. You have enough to fret about with Izaya, anyway, don’t you?”

Shizuo would like to protest, if only for the sake of giving Izaya a chance to save face as a subject rather than a participant in the conversation. But Izaya’s not paying attention to them, or at least isn’t looking when Shizuo glances over at him; his head is ducked down, his shoulders falling heavy like his hands weigh too much for him to figure out how to raise them, his feet planted on the floor as if he’s thinking of never moving again. He looks worn down, as if the efforts of the night are too much for him to bear alongside the need to maintain his composure, and whatever self-consciousness Shizuo was feeling on his behalf evaporates to a rush of concern that goes through him like electricity.

“Yeah,” he says without thinking about the word at all, and then he’s stepping in, reaching out to touch a hand against Izaya’s elbow, to offer the support of his hand to the other’s position. “Hey, Izaya, let’s go up to our room.” Shinra’s offering the keycard when Shizuo looks back for it, coupling the flat rectangle with a smile that is perhaps meant as encouraging and looks more alarming than anything else, and Shizuo takes it with a nod that passes as the closest thing to thanks he can offer. “Come on.” Izaya capitulates to the pull of Shizuo’s hold at his elbow, shuffling himself forward to follow the other with passive obedience, and Shizuo keeps watching him, frowning more attention down at the dark of the other’s bowed head than he gives to the hallway around them as they proceed into the lines of individual rooms.

“Here.” Shizuo pulls Izaya to a halt in front of the room marked with the number assigned to them; Izaya stops as readily as he began moving, his footsteps falling still in instant obedience to Shizuo’s urging. It makes Shizuo’s skin prickle, reminds him too-vividly of that first night, when Izaya moved with the robotic focus of a doll being pushed along a track, as if his brush with death had drained all the energy of life from him along with his humanity. Shizuo had thought he might be getting better, had seen some faint suggestion of hope in Izaya’s active efforts to find his maker and even in the other’s willingness to press his teeth against Shizuo’s skin without being forced into it. There had seemed to be something like activity starting to form itself behind Izaya’s eyes, some measure of his old reckless energy reasserting itself in his motion; and now it’s all gone, evaporated as entirely as if it were never there at all, as if all Shizuo’s evidence is nothing more than futile daydreams. Izaya follows the pull of Shizuo’s hand, and stops at the push of Shizuo’s fingers, and even now, as Shizuo tugs the door open to let them both into their hotel room, Izaya doesn’t move until Shizuo says “Go ahead,” as if he needs the invitation to allow himself permission to act. He steps into the dark of the room, his hair and the dark of his coat making him nearly vanish into the shadows, and Shizuo follows him, letting the weight of the door swing shut behind them before he reaches for the lightswitch next to the door. The glow of the lamp illuminates the room with light, from the desk and the armchair in one corner to the width of the king-sized bed in the center, the smooth lines of the sheets over it tugged into pristine invitation for any occupants of the room.

“You can have the bed,” Shizuo says, toeing off his shoes before stepping forward to toss the keycard onto the desk and reach for the edge of the comforter to tug it forward and off the bed. “I’ll make up a space for myself on the floor.” He hasn’t slept well since the night Izaya was turned, but he thinks that’s more the fault of his own racing thoughts than of the actual physical discomfort offered by making a bed of the floor instead of the mattress intended as such. “Will you be warm enough without the comforter?” It’s an idle question, not one that needs an answer; Izaya hasn’t voiced any complaints for the last few days, and Shizuo rather doubts that he would even if his situation deserved it. Shizuo lets the comforter fall to make a heap of softness on the floor alongside the bed and drops to kneel against the edge of it; it’s thicker than the blankets offered at the cheaper hotels he and Izaya have been staying at, the extra weight making it seem far closer to an inviting bed than what he’s been making do with. He huffs surprised appreciation, shifts to settle against the comfort as he turns back to face the other still standing where Shizuo left him. “I can do without it if you--” And his words cut off abruptly, because Izaya _isn’t_ where Shizuo left him; he’s stepping forward, moving with such silence that Shizuo didn’t hear him and has no warning at all before Izaya is dropping to his knees and falling against him as part of a single, fluid motion. Izaya’s arms catch around Shizuo’s neck, Izaya’s body presses close against his, and for a moment Shizuo is left to act wholly on reflex, lifting an arm to curl around Izaya’s waist and press to the other’s back to steady him without thinking about the action at all.

“Oh,” he says, his voice dropping off into startled depth as Izaya leans against him, as Shizuo’s own reflex pulls the other in closer against him in his first impulse to steady their shared balance. “Izaya.” The word sounds strange in his throat, hums oddly against the inside of his chest like it’s trying to resonate into some new frequency of heat, like it’s attempting to form itself into something wholly novel against his lips; he wonders if Izaya can feel how hard his heart is pounding, wonders if the other notices how fast Shizuo’s breathing is coming against his hair. “Are you alright?”  
“No,” Izaya says without lifting his head from the pillow he’s making of Shizuo’s shoulder. There’s no threat of his teeth, none of the shivering anticipation of contact that came with their interaction the night before; his mouth is against Shizuo’s collar instead, the edge of his teeth kept at a safe distance from the line of tension against Shizuo’s neck. It’s still close enough for Shizuo to feel the other’s words as a physical presence against him, still enough that he imagines he can catch the sound of Izaya’s voice against the rapidfire thud of his heart hammering in his chest. Izaya’s arms tighten around his neck, one of the other’s hands slides up to dig in against Shizuo’s hair and push against the back of his head. “Shut up, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo shuts up. He closes his mouth on the pressure of all the things he wants to say, and tightens his arms holding Izaya against him, and he doesn’t say anything at all, even when the raw edge of Izaya’s inhales turns into hiccuping arrhythmia and the fabric of Shizuo’s shirt starts to go wet with damp spilling over the inky dark of Izaya’s lashes.

If he needed any further proof, Shizuo thinks, this is more than enough to stand as evidence to Izaya’s continued humanity.


	18. Connection

They don’t talk about it.

This is rapidly becoming the norm. Shizuo never realized, before, how much talking Izaya did without saying anything of real value; with the veil of chatter stripped away it becomes obvious, becomes printed in every moment of the long expanses of silence that span the fruitless searches of the following night. Shizuo starts paying attention to the angle of Izaya’s head, and the strain in his shoulders, all the little things that are easy to miss when Izaya’s words and laughter are serving as a distraction but perfectly clear to someone looking for them. He’s sure by the time they break for the daylight, to separate locations this time, that Izaya needs to feed again, even though the other’s pace has barely slowed and neither Izaya not Celty offers any commentary to that effect. Izaya’s walking with deliberate care, his steps carrying more the weight of disguise than of casual calm, and by the time they’re letting their hotel door shut behind them Shizuo is more than certain of what needs to happen.

“You’re hungry,” he says by way of greeting, tossing the keycard to the bed without reaching to turn on the glow of the light overhead. “You should drink.”

Izaya shifts in front of him, turning to look back over his shoulder at Shizuo standing between him and the doorway. “Thanks for the concern,” he says, in a tone that says the opposite. “I’m glad you have such a good grasp of what I need, Shizu-chan, how would I ever be able to take care of myself without you?”

Shizuo frowns. “The last time you were hungry you didn’t say anything until you collapsed in the street,” he points out. Izaya’s lashes dip, the weight of them fluttering over the scarlet glow of his eyes, and Shizuo steps in towards the edge of the bed, already reaching to unfasten the cuff of his shirtsleeve in expectation of what’s to come. “I’ll stop hovering when you start taking care of yourself.” His cuff comes loose, the sleeve slides up over his arm; Shizuo flexes his wrist, working against the dull ache of the near-healed cut he gave himself and testing the shift of motion along his arm. He can’t feel the puncture wounds from Izaya’s teeth anymore at all, isn’t sure he’d be able to pick them out even in the full illumination of daylight. “Are you really going to pick this fight?”

“I never said I wasn’t going to,” Izaya snaps back. His jaw sets, shifting under his skin as he frowns into irritation; but when he moves it’s to step forward over the gap between them, to make a surrender of his physical position even if his expression is still strained on irritation.

Shizuo rolls his sleeve over on itself and holds his arm out towards Izaya. “Here.”

Izaya lifts his hand, reaches to press cool fingers to Shizuo’s skin; and then he pushes, forcing the other’s hand back and away so suddenly that Shizuo’s arm falls before he can stall the involuntary swing of the motion. He blinks hard, startled out of his expectation by the action, and then his mouth catches on a frown, his forehead creases with the rising tide of irritated worry in his chest.

“ _Hey_ ,” he snaps. “I thought you said--”

“It’s a pain to drink from your wrist,” Izaya says, fast, his voice pitched loud enough to cut over the rough weight of Shizuo’s protest and shove it back to startled quiet in the other’s throat. “The veins are too small, I can’t get a full mouthful from them.”

Shizuo lets his arm fall to his side, his skin prickling with uncertainty. “Okay,” he says, still frowning at Izaya in front of him. “So what do you want instead? The inside of my elbow?”

Izaya huffs a hard exhale. “Don’t be stupid,” he says, and then he lifts his hand, and his fingers catch at Shizuo’s shoulder, and Shizuo can feel his entire body shudder with the premonition of heat while Izaya’s touch is still settling in against the sleeve of his shirt. Izaya’s gaze slides against Shizuo’s collar, up over the curve of it to where it’s clinging to bare skin, and Shizuo can see the shift of the other’s throat work on an involuntary swallow that speaks better to his intention than the suggestive weight of his touch at Shizuo’s shoulder. Izaya’s hand tenses, his hand presses close to the other’s shirt. “Sit down, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo sits. He thinks he’d do anything Izaya told him to, right now, with his blood thrumming so hot in his veins he feels that he must be exhaling anticipation into a visible glow in the air. He drops to the floor, his legs folding beneath him to drop him to his knees and then to sit at the floor next to the bed, and Izaya is moving as quickly, shifting down as rapidly as Shizuo sits to fit himself against the other’s body. His feet span Shizuo’s outstretched knees, his knees fit against Shizuo’s hips, and then Shizuo has Izaya in his lap, and Izaya’s fingers still pressing to intention at his collar, and he’s not completely sure how he’s going to make it through the next few minutes for how fast his heart is racing. He can hear Izaya take a breath, the sound of it slow enough to make the deliberation behind it clear even if Shizuo didn’t know the catch of air to be unnecessary; and then the fingers at Shizuo’s shoulder ease, Izaya’s thumb slides up over bare skin, and Shizuo’s head is tipping to the side without any hesitation at all, his whole body capitulating to the suggestion of Izaya’s touch before the other has even put words to it. Izaya is heavy over his lap, his legs angled wide to fit around Shizuo’s hips, but his balance is still rocked back, there’s still a gap of a few breathless inches between the rhythm of Shizuo’s heart pounding in his chest and the still peace of Izaya’s in his. It feels strange, an awkward attempt at maintaining distance out of keeping with the intimacy of Izaya’s thumb sliding over the thrum of Shizuo’s pulse fluttering in his throat; but Shizuo can’t find the breath to say anything about it, and Izaya’s focus is lingering long against the press of his fingers to Shizuo’s skin. His thumb slides so slowly Shizuo would swear he can feel the ridges of the other’s fingerprint dragging individually over his neck before flexing to brace against the back of his head, just alongside the ridge of his vertebrae. It’s as good as a warning, as good as a shout; Shizuo catches a breath of anticipation, feeling his pulse skip faster in his chest, and then Izaya is ducking in to press his mouth against the other’s throat.

It feels like a kiss, for the first moment. Izaya’s lips are soft at Shizuo’s skin, the press of his parted lips spilling enough heat into Shizuo’s veins that he almost doesn’t notice the uncanny cool of Izaya’s skin or the lack of an exhale against his hair. Shizuo’s own breathing rushes out of him at the contact, his hands come up of their own accord to catch and weight at Izaya’s waist, to grab to a handhold at the other’s hip; but Izaya doesn’t give him time to compose himself, doesn’t let Shizuo have a moment to brace himself against what he knows is about to happen. There’s just the weight of lips against Shizuo’s skin, the friction forming itself into the illusion of romance; and then pressure, the needle-sharp points of teeth bearing down against skin, and Shizuo’s empty lungs flex on an unvoiced attempt at a groan as Izaya’s teeth pierce into his neck.

It’s nothing like Izaya drinking from his wrist. That was distant, a strange, prickling heat that spread up the line of his forearm and climbed to his elbow in search of his heart, a rush of electricity that formed itself in his fingertips before winding its way up into the rest of him. This is immediate, a surge of heat that steals Shizuo’s breath and leaves him gasping through a moan as hot as it is silent for want of air. His hands seize at Izaya’s hips, his fingers dig in with what must be painful force, but Izaya doesn’t flinch away; he’s pushing closer instead, reaching up with his free hand to grab at Shizuo’s hair and drag the other’s head farther sideways, as if he needs to press in closer to draw more of the other’s blood past his lips. Shizuo struggles through an inhale, gasping to fill his lungs with the air to modulate his spinning thoughts; but then Izaya sucks harder against his neck, the shift of his throat drawing a spill of blood Shizuo can feel shudder through the whole of his body, and “ _Izaya_ ” is what falls from his lips, the other’s name straining into the weight of an exhale too hot to be anything but a moan. Izaya’s teeth dig at Shizuo’s neck, the other’s jaw flexes as he draws another rush of liquid from the artery under his lips, and Shizuo is pulling at the other’s hips, dragging Izaya in closer to him with a fluidity too reflexive to so much as hesitate for more rational considerations. He just need to be closer, needs to have Izaya nearer against him, and Izaya’s tipping into submission to Shizuo’s urging, closing the few inches of space between them like they were never there at all, like his body was only ever made to press flush against Shizuo’s. His thighs flex, his body rocks forward, and when Shizuo arches up against the friction with a half-voiced groan Izaya is there to meet him, the open angle of his thighs meeting the aching heat of Shizuo’s cock inside his pants. Shizuo drags down, Izaya presses closer, and for a moment they’re grinding against each other, the full resistance of Izaya’s weight bearing down to meet the reflexive motion of Shizuo’s hips up against him.

“Fuck,” Shizuo says, feeling dizzy, sounding overheated, “Izaya” and Izaya’s fingers twist in his hair, Izaya’s hips rock forward against him to offer friction in kind to meet and match Shizuo’s. Shizuo can feel Izaya hard inside his jeans, can feel the pressure of the other’s cock pushing against his stomach, and for a moment he’s breathless with the rush of pleasure that spills through him, some tangled blend of the supernatural heat of Izaya’s teeth pressing at his throat and the simpler physical arousal flushing Shizuo so hard against the inside line of the other’s thighs. His body is demanding satisfaction, his heartbeat is rushing faster in his chest, and against his hair Izaya’s fingers are winding into something very nearly affection, at his neck Izaya’s mouth is shifting into something very nearly a kiss. Shizuo hears himself make a noise, his throat straining over something halfway between a growl and a whimper, and at his throat Izaya lets his hold go, gasping over a breath that sounds as desperate as if he truly is in need of air for his survival.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says again, his voice forming into a rhythm he can’t remember how to stop, as if it’s following the beat of his heart more than anything else, and he turns his head in reflexive pursuit of the weight of Izaya’s mouth against his skin again. Izaya’s still pressing close against him, so near that Shizuo’s nose bumps the edge of the other’s jaw as he turns his head; he shifts as Shizuo tips up towards him, his chin turning in involuntary response to the plea at Shizuo’s lips. His breathing is hot, his exhales warm like steam against Shizuo’s cheek; and then Shizuo lifts his chin, and parts his lips, and his mouth is pressing against Izaya’s, their lips falling into alignment as easily as the weight of their bodies pressing close against each other.

Izaya’s mouth is warm, his skin flushed into something approximating the heat of humanity; Shizuo has the brief, dizzy thought that it’s his own blood doing that, it’s the thud of life coming so hard in his chest that is granting Izaya’s cheeks that flush and bringing Izaya’s breathing so hot against his mouth. But then Izaya turns his head, and Izaya’s tongue presses at Shizuo’s mouth, and Shizuo’s eyes are shutting and he’s forgetting all the logical considerations of the moment, forgetting everything around him but the heat of Izaya licking in against his tongue. Izaya tastes like blood, his lips and teeth and tongue are coated with the metallic bite of iron and copper; but Shizuo is seeking it out, chasing down the taste of Izaya himself underneath the tang of his own blood in the other’s mouth, and when he rocks his hips up he can feel the sound of Izaya whimpering at the friction, can catch the vibration of the noise too soft for his ears but clear against the sensitive skin of his lips. He’s leaning in closer, pressing hard against the borrowed heat of Izaya’s mouth, and Izaya is pushing right back, arching his back and tightening his hold at Shizuo’s hair as if to hold the other still, as if Shizuo needs to be urged to stillness, as if Shizuo isn’t gripping bruise-hard against the other’s hips right through the denim of his jeans. Shizuo tips his head back, grants Izaya the advantage of height for a moment in exchange for the other’s distraction, and when he loosens his hold against Izaya’s hip it’s only so he can draw his hand sideways and across to press flush against the front of the other’s jeans. Izaya jerks at the contact, his body tensing against Shizuo as fast as he hisses a startled exhale of heat, and Shizuo is moving as quickly as if the huff of the other’s breathing is an entire paragraph of encouragement, fumbling blind to push open the button holding the denim closed and wrenching at the zipper until it drags down under his touch.

“ _Ah_ ,” Izaya gasps, his voice breaking so sharply it sounds nearly like a sob in his throat, his hips jolting forward as Shizuo’s fingers press close against him in pursuit of the tension fluttering against his stomach and leading down to the resistance of his cock. “Shizu-chan, I.”

Shizuo gasps a breath, tries to recollect his composure from whatever heat-hazed daydream he was in. It’s difficult; his palm is pressed close against skin flushed to near-human warmth, he’s sure Izaya’s length is mere inches away from the tips of his fingers. Izaya’s still trembling against him, his body is still pressed close to Shizuo’s; but he’s not speaking, he’s not giving any kind of sign for protest or agreement either one. Shizuo’s heart is pounding with want and his breathing is catching in his throat but Izaya’s fingers are tense in his hair, and Izaya’s body is taut under his touch, and for a brief moment he’s not at all sure the other wants him to continue at all.

“Izaya,” he says, and there’s a weight to the name, a familiarity to the way the syllables fit against the heat-slur in his voice, like it was always meant to be there, like this is the sound his nameless groans have been trying to fit around through all those late nights he’s spent soothed by formless fantasies instead of another person’s presence. Izaya is panting against Shizuo’s mouth, his breathing rushing fast between their lips; Shizuo can’t help but tip his head closer in pursuit of another kiss, of the comfort of friction between his mouth and Izaya’s. “Is this okay?”

For a long moment everything is still. Shizuo’s hand is still pressing to Izaya’s skin; Izaya’s fingers are still making a fist in his hair, still pulling at the strands as if he’s trying to drag the other’s neck farther back, as if he intends to resume sucking at the puncture wounds Shizuo can feel trickling a path of blood against the side of his neck and down to the collar of his shirt. Shizuo wouldn’t mind; with how fast his pulse is racing at the idea, he thinks he might appreciate the pressure as much as he would the weight of Izaya’s palm grinding down against the front of his pants to grant some intentional relief to the ache of want thrumming under his skin. Then Izaya huffs an exhale, the rush of air made obviously deliberate by his lack of need for the oxygen it carries, and when he ducks his head the gesture is so obviously surrender that Shizuo doesn’t even have to ask for confirmation of it. It’s just understood, the communication so clear it doesn’t need words, and Shizuo is moving as instantly as he receives it, pressing his touch down over those scant inches of distance to drag his fingertips over Izaya’s length. Izaya jerks at the contact, whimpers something too desperate to be intelligible, and Shizuo is responding as quickly as Izaya reacts, pushing in harder, farther, until he can catch and curl his fingers around the flushed heat of Izaya’s cock. Izaya shudders at the contact, his hand at Shizuo’s neck sliding around and back to make a desperate hold against the other’s collar, and Shizuo strokes up over him without hesitating, his fingers finding out the curves and angles of the other’s length like he’s mapping a new territory with every drag of his hand.

“This is okay,” he says again, turning his head so the words come against Izaya’s hair, against the dark of the other’s head ducked close against his shoulder. “This feels good?”

“Fuck,” Izaya blurts against his shoulder. The harsh edges of the consonants drag at his tongue, flare to heat at the back of his throat. Shizuo’s thumb slides up against the head of the other’s cock and Izaya’s voice breaks into a whimper, his hips bucking forward into a helpless thrust against Shizuo’s grip. “ _Yes_.”

“Okay,” Shizuo says, sounding something like as shaky as he feels. “Good” and he keeps going, tightening his hold at Izaya’s hip to hold the other steady atop him while he strokes up over the flushed resistance of the other’s length against his palm. Izaya’s legs are tense around Shizuo’s thighs, Shizuo can feel the flex and shift of them as Izaya fights back his reflex to buck up for more with every drag of Shizuo’s palm, and Shizuo moves faster, harder, timing the slide of his grip to the shudders of tension running through Izaya’s body. Izaya makes a noise against his neck, something weak and desperate with wanting, and then he’s turning his head and his teeth are piercing Shizuo’s skin and Shizuo is groaning, his entire body is flaring into heat as Izaya’s mouth pulls another spill of blood from his veins. He rocks up himself, his hips demanding friction against the inside of his pants, against the soft inside line of Izaya’s thigh, against the whole solid weight of Izaya’s body over him, under him, he wants Izaya on the bed and he wants Izaya’s knees fitting to his hips while he pushes forward to press his cock into the heat of the other’s body underneath him. He wants to see Izaya’s face and watch the shimmer of those inky lashes over scarlet eyes as he pushes into him; but there’s too much to manage to get them there, and Izaya’s fingers are trembling where he’s bracing at the back of Shizuo’s head, and Shizuo can feel the last few seconds of expectation slipping slick past his hold around Izaya’s cock.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, except it comes out hotter than he intended, comes out melting over the heat in his veins and the resistance of Izaya’s body on him and the dragging force of those lips at his skin. “ _Izaya_ ” and Izaya tenses against him, his teeth digging in harder for a moment of flaring heat. Shizuo can feel his skin tearing, can feel puncture wounds pulling into a crescent of a bite mark at his shoulder as the fire in his veins spikes higher, glowing so brilliantly it threatens to consume him to ash as certainly as the sun would Izaya; and his hand drags, his palm catches over the head of Izaya’s cock, and Izaya lets his hold go all at once, the pressure of his set jaw dissolving into an open-mouthed whimper at Shizuo’s shoulder as his cock twitches and spills warm wet over Shizuo’s grip. His head drops down, his teeth pulling away from Shizuo’s skin to be replaced by the weight of his forehead, as if the burden of holding himself upright is too much, and for a moment they stay like that, Shizuo stroking gentle friction over Izaya while the other quivers and trembles through the aftershocks of his orgasm.

Shizuo would be happy to remain as they are. His own aching arousal is all but forgotten, the heartbeat of desire in his chest is soothed and sated by the evidence of Izaya’s pleasure still quivering through the other’s body; he wouldn’t mind if Izaya let his arm slide around Shizuo’s shoulders, if Izaya let himself go slack and heavy on Shizuo’s lap to sleep through the hours of daylight in the curve of the other’s arms. The idea is a comfort in itself, it warms the whole of Shizuo’s chest with the pressure of something too big to be simple affection; but then Izaya’s hand tightens at Shizuo’s shoulder, his arm flexes with deliberate force, and when he pushes Shizuo away as he straightens Shizuo has no chance to resist even if he wanted to. He’s forced back against the edge of the bed behind him, pinned entirely in place by the grip of Izaya’s hand at his shoulder, and over him Izaya is staring at his face, his own expression unreadable as he gazes at Shizuo like he’s trying to memorize the other’s features. It’s only for a heartbeat of time; then he’s moving, pushing Shizuo’s grip away from him with one hand and pulling his clothes back into order as he slides backwards and steadies his weight over the other’s knees instead of atop his lap. He has to let Shizuo’s shoulder go to refasten the button, to manage the details of the fabric as he ducks his head down to watch what he’s doing, but no sooner is Shizuo reaching to replace his grip at the other’s hips than Izaya’s hand is back at his shoulder and Izaya’s palm is bearing him back against the edge of the bed once more.

“Izaya--” Shizuo starts, but Izaya’s free hand is catching at the front of his slacks, the force of the other’s palm is grinding down against him, and whatever coherency Shizuo was going to offer dissolves into a groan instead, his head dropping back as his hips jolt up to dig in against the resistance of the other’s touch. Izaya only gives him a moment of pressure, only a taste of relief; then he’s pulling at the front of Shizuo’s slacks, his fingers working the fabric open with startling speed, until Shizuo is still in the middle of catching an inhale from the first press of Izaya’s touch when cool fingers slide in and under the weight of his clothes to seek out the heat of his cock.

“ _Oh_ ,” Shizuo gasps, and Izaya’s fingers curl around him, Izaya’s grip steadies close against the curve of his length. “ _Fuck_ ” and that’s all he has time for because Izaya is moving, instantly, with impossible speed, pressing his fingers in close against Shizuo’s cock and stroking up over him with force, like he’s racing against time to bring Shizuo to orgasm. The friction spills into Shizuo’s veins, a flood of sensation too great for him to bear or to stand the least hope of resisting, and he’s falling back against the bed behind him, his body jolting with tremors of sensation steered by the drag of Izaya’s grip over him more than his own control. His eyes are wide, he’s gasping for air to fill the space in his lungs, and Izaya is still moving, still gripping Shizuo’s shoulder like he’s trying to shove the other through the bed bodily and still stroking over Shizuo’s length with a desperate, overwhelming speed.

Shizuo’s breathing is spasming in his chest, his vision is hazing; but he struggles to blink himself back to clarity, struggles to bring his focus back to Izaya’s face. Izaya’s staring at him still, his crimson eyes glowing bright in the dim of the room as he watches Shizuo’s face; there’s no tension at his mouth, no crease in his forehead. He’s just watching, gazing at Shizuo as if nothing else in the world exists but the other’s face, as if he intends to memorize every detail of Shizuo’s reaction to hold to through a lonely future. Shizuo blinks hard, fighting to keep his vision clear, to hold himself to the present as long as he can; but Izaya’s fingers are pressing close against him, and Izaya’s touch is urging him towards the edge of pleasure, and he doesn’t stand a chance against the insistent weight of the other’s hand sliding over him.

“Oh,” Shizuo says, his ears ringing as the tension in his stomach turns itself over, as it resolves into the weight of certainty he can feel fit inside his body like it was made to be there. Izaya’s lashes flutter, Izaya’s wrist twists, Izaya’s fingers tighten; and Shizuo gasps, and moans “ _Izaya_ ” over one long, drawn-out spill of heat as his whole body seizes tight on pleasure. His eyes roll up, his head goes back, and he’s coming, he’s jerking through waves of sensation that are spurting over Izaya’s fingers and across his own shirt and he can’t stop, he can’t breathe, he can’t do anything at all but shake open-mouthed through the force of the pleasure Izaya’s grip is drawing out of him. Izaya keeps moving, keeps dragging up over Shizuo’s twitching cock, and Shizuo needs him to stop and wants him to continue forever, wants Izaya to keep pulling those electric bursts of overstimulation through him until he can do nothing but lie still and shudder helplessly through each one. His vision flickers white with each of Izaya’s movements, his lungs clench tight to spill hard-won air into tiny, whimpering groans of heat; Shizuo can feel his awareness starting to fragment, can feel himself going dizzy from lack of air and too-much sensation. He wonders distantly if he’s going to pass out, wonders if Izaya would be more upset or pleased; and then Izaya’s movement stills, his hand stops its steady rhythm, and Shizuo is left to gasp a deep lungful of air and find his way back to reality.

It’s very quiet for a moment. Shizuo’s head is tipped back on the bed, his throat angled sharply up like he’s offering himself for Izaya’s teeth; the idea flushes him towards warmth again, just for a moment, before he tightens his hold on Izaya’s hip and uses the point of contact to urge himself back to upright. Izaya’s still staring at him, his mouth still that neutral line and his expression still relaxed into unreadable blankness; but his eyes are glowing radiant like sunlight, tracing out Shizuo’s features with so much attention Shizuo can feel it like Izaya’s fingers are trailing over his skin.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, and the words are easy, they’re waiting for him like they have been there all his life. “I love you.”

Izaya’s lashes dip, his lips part; Shizuo can hear the rush of air in the inhale he takes, can feel the flex of the other’s fingers at his shoulder as clear as a shout to give away his surprise. But his expression holds level, the lines of his face cling to composure instead of giveaway emotion, and by the time he’s opening his eyes again his hand has relaxed too, he’s drawn his mouth closed again around whatever secrets he’s holding to himself. He draws his touch up from Shizuo’s shoulder, slides his fingers in against the soft of the other’s hair and around the back of his neck, and when he leans in over the distance between them Shizuo shuts his eyes in obedient surrender to the weight of Izaya’s lips against his mouth. There’s a press of cool soft against his lips, the friction of Izaya’s mouth touching and molding against his own for a moment; and then it’s gone, Izaya’s drawing back and away even as Shizuo starts to open his mouth in anticipation of more. The loss is startling, it leaves Shizuo feeling vaguely dizzy and disoriented, and then Izaya’s weight shifts too as he draws free of Shizuo’s hand at his hip and gets to his feet before the other has had a chance to blink himself back into focus. By the time Shizuo has his eyes open and looks around Izaya is halfway across the room towards the bathroom, and he’s still struggling to find words to offer to the other when Izaya steps out of sight and draws the door shut behind him. There’s the sound of the fan coming on, a spill of illumination from under the door as Izaya turns the light on, and then the splash of water loud and echoing enough to drown out any more specific sounds from the other room.

Shizuo stares at the glow from around the bathroom door for a moment, thinking about the soft of Izaya’s mouth, the borrowed heat of his skin, the shadows fitting behind the glow of his eyes; and then he turns back to face the window of the room, and stares unseeing at the edge of the drawn curtains as the sunrise on the other side brightens the dim grey of dawn to the clear white of morning.


	19. Promise

Izaya takes his time in the shower. Shizuo wonders more than once if he shouldn’t just lie down and claim a few minutes of rest while he waits for the other to finish; but he’ll only have to get up again, and he doesn’t think he could sleep anyway. His whole body is aching with exhaustion, the lack of blood and excess of stimulation conspiring to leave him drained in every possible way; but shutting his eyes seems like an impossibility, like he can’t possibly let himself fall into sleep and miss out on a heartbeat’s worth of the strange brilliance that has become his reality. The bitemarks at the side of his neck ache, he can feel the bruise of Izaya’s teeth rising to visibility with each passing breath; but all his skin is warm, glowing, as if he’s somehow managed to embody all the illumination of the sunlight Izaya bears behind his eyes instead of on his skin, now. The thought is a pleasant one, something to press solid inside his chest and hum gently inside his ribcage like a counterpoint for his heartbeat; it leaves him smiling without meaning to, without realizing he is, until the sound of the bathroom door coming open startles his attention around to where Izaya is emerging with his hair wet and his clothes back in place. He doesn’t say anything at all, just turns to climb onto the bed and curl into his usual position for the daylight hours; Shizuo waits until he’s settled and looking like he’ll never move again before he says “I’ll be right back” and goes to take Izaya’s place in the bathroom.

The hot water feels good. His legs are still a little shaky, still uncertain in themselves after the force of the orgasm that so undid him under Izaya’s fingers; but the shower rinses the sticky from his hands, and the salt from his skin, and -- after a moment to press tentative fingers against the injury -- the blood from his neck as well. The ache eases with the warmth, as if his body is retreating from its original complaint at this proof of gentleness, and Shizuo stands there for long minutes, just letting the heat of the water soothe the tension away from the line of his neck.

His clothes are a mess when he gets out. His pants aren’t as bad as they could be; rumpled, certainly, but the effect of Izaya straddling him is no worse than what sleeping in them for the last few days has already caused. There’s no blood at all on his shirt or undershirt -- Izaya must have been more careful with his mouth than Shizuo realized -- but there’s the sticky beginnings of a stain against the bottom inch of his shirt, from Izaya or himself Shizuo isn’t sure which. There’s something strangely charming about the thought, about not being able to distinguish the evidence of his own pleasure from Izaya’s; the idea makes Shizuo smile, keeps his mouth curving as he washes out the bottom hem of his shirt in the sink and drapes it over the shower rod to dry. That leaves him just his undershirt and pants to wear over the shower-damp of his hair and skin, and then he’s shutting off the bathroom light and reemerging to the shadows of the closed hotel room.

Izaya is right where Shizuo left him. It’s a relief to see him there, even if Shizuo hadn’t truly considered the possibility that Izaya might draw the blinds open on himself; that concern has faded with each day that passes without incident, until by now the thought is barely a passing flicker in his mind. Still, the flicker lingers, and the tiny, paranoid part of Shizuo breathes a sigh of relief to see the curve of Izaya’s shoulders still right where he was when Shizuo went in for his shower. Shizuo stands by the bathroom door for a moment, looking at the dark of Izaya’s shirt and the soft fall of his drying hair against the back of his neck; and then he clears his throat, and lets his attention fall, and steps in to pull at the pillow on the near side of the bed. He intends to free the pillow before he goes looking for an extra blanket to make up into a bed on the floor; but he’s just curling his fingers around the pillowcase when Izaya says “You’ll be more comfortable on the bed,” without any audible inflection on his voice besides objective statement. He sounds like he’s making an observation, as if it doesn’t affect him at all; but Shizuo goes still, his whole body prickling with the electricity of the suggestion carried on Izaya’s words, and for the first heartbeat of time he can’t think at all. Izaya is right there, close enough to touch if he stretches an arm out, his shoulders hunched into a protective curl like he’s trying to defend himself; but his words are an invitation not borne out by his body language, they carry a whole weight of possibility so clear that for the first moment Shizuo can’t even catch his breath around the idea.

“Are you sure?” is what he finally says, his voice far softer than Izaya’s cool statement.

“Of course I’m sure,” Izaya says, with something almost like his old aggression under the words. “Unless you have an unexpected penchant for a sore neck and an aching back?”

“That isn’t what I--” Shizuo starts, and then stops, because he’s sure Izaya knows perfectly well what he was really asking, and this is the closest to a direct answer he’s likely to get. The idea seems impossible, unfathomable in the space of Shizuo’s reality as he knows it; but he can feel the throb of the bruise at his neck in the shape of Izaya’s mouth, he can imagine the curve of Izaya’s body in his arms now as he never could before, and when he lets his breath go it’s into a sigh that sounds a little like resignation and mostly like epiphany.

“Okay,” he says instead, and he moves at once, before he has time to overthink himself into hesitation again. The mattress is soft under his knees as he climbs onto the edge of it, the sheets rustle faintly against his weight, but Shizuo ignores the creak of the springs and the give of the blankets alike. His focus is on Izaya in front of him, on the tight-tense curl of the other’s body that makes such a smooth line of his spine under his shirt, and when he moves to lie down it’s to fit himself to that curve, to align himself behind Izaya with a gap of breathless inches between them while he stares at the back of the other’s neck and thinks about how well their bodies would slot together. Izaya stays very still, not speaking and not moving and not breathing, like he’s waiting for something, like he’s waiting for Shizuo; and after a long span of adrenaline-soaked seconds Shizuo lifts his hand from his hip, and reaches out, and touches his fingers just against the curve of Izaya’s waist.

He’s expecting rejection. He hadn’t entirely thought through the logistics of this action even as he made it; but he’s ready for Izaya to smack his hand away, to hiss some half-formed insult, even just to curl in tighter on himself in obvious and unvoiced refusal of his touch. But Izaya does none of that; he takes a breath instead, the sound loud against the quiet of the room, and when Shizuo’s palm settles against him his shoulders ease, just barely, releasing some measure of the unbearable tension caught across them. Shizuo’s breathing spills out of him in a rush, he can feel his eyelids going heavy with appreciation; and “Izaya,” he says, the other’s name soft like a prayer on his tongue, and he’s moving in all at once, sliding closer over the sheets of the bed to fit his body against the painful curve of Izaya’s. Izaya’s breath spills out of him as Shizuo presses against the other’s back, fast enough that it takes on the outline of a whimper in the back of his throat; but then Shizuo tugs at Izaya’s hip, and Izaya tips back against the support of Shizuo’s chest, and Shizuo can feel everything in him tremble into bliss too brilliant to be contained.

Izaya doesn’t flinch away. Shizuo keeps expecting him to; when his hand at the other’s hip slides down to trace against the flex of his thigh, or when he slides his free hand under and around Izaya’s waist to pull the other in against him, or when he presses his face against the dark of Izaya’s hair to breathe in against the smell of his skin, unchanged even with everything else that has shifted between them. Izaya just stays very still, offering passive surrender to Shizuo’s wandering touch, only catching a brief, startled breath when Shizuo’s fingers brush into ticklish contact at the hem of his shirt, or when Shizuo’s exhale spills warm over the back of his neck. Shizuo shuts his eyes and blocks out the immediacy of sight rendered unnecessary by the circumstances; he doesn’t need to see what he’s doing, he thinks he could find his way across Izaya’s body with unerring precision using his fingertips alone.

It’s strange, how well he knows this, how easy it is to fit himself against Izaya pressed close against him; it’s like coming back to some long-lost memory, or like putting together the pieces of knowledge he’s been accumulating for years without knowing it. That’s the angle of Izaya’s knee against his, the drawn-up tension he always adopts when he’s particularly anxious about something; this is the gap of pale skin between the dipping collar of his favorite shirt and the fall of his soft-dark hair. Here’s the scar from a mission early in their first year, when Izaya took a knife just above his hip when the subclass they were chasing was faster than Shizuo expected him to be; Shizuo can still remember Izaya snapping at him to leave the weapon where it was until they got back to keep the bleeding contained. He’s always thought the ridge of the healed skin around the injury would be rough, like a callus formed of old hurt instead of repetitive motion; but it’s smooth to the touch, almost slick under his fingertips, softer even than the delicate skin all around it. Shizuo presses his fingers there, stroking idly over the inches of the old injury like he’s trying to memorize the width and breadth of it, and when he turns his head in it’s to fit closer against the back of Izaya’s neck, to touch his mouth very gently to the angle of bone pressing close to the skin at the top of the other’s spine.

“Will you stay with me?” he asks, very quietly, framing the words to match the quiet of the room, the stillness granted by the pattern of a single heartbeat over two sets of irregular breathing. “After all this is over.” Shizuo presses closer, fitting his nose in against the dark of Izaya’s hair at the back of his neck; he can feel the startled inhale Izaya takes at the contact shift under his palm holding the other back against him, can feel the movement in the other’s ribcage the more clearly for how isolated the motion is. “I want to stay with you.”

There’s a pause before Izaya responds. For a moment Shizuo thinks he won’t get a reply at all, that the other’s silence will be the only thing Shizuo has to take with him into the shadowy uncertainty of the future. But then there’s a shift, Izaya’s shoulder moving as he lifts his arm, and then friction against the back of Shizuo’s hand, cool fingertips ghosting against his tendons like Izaya is feeling out the shape and force of the other’s hold on him. There’s the drag of skin on skin, Izaya’s cool touch mapping out the warmth of Shizuo’s body; and then pressure, contact, the weight of Izaya’s palm sliding in to fit against the other’s. Shizuo’s skin flushes with heat, his eyes prickle with some unformed intensity of emotion, and Izaya’s hand tightens over his, pressing hard against his hold for a moment like he’s locking the other’s grip into place around him.

“Yes,” he says, and his voice sounds strange in his throat but his hold is tight on Shizuo’s, his fingers flexing to dig in to the verge of pain against the other’s skin. “Yes, Shizu-chan. When I’m done I’ll stay with you.”

Shizuo sighs an exhale against the back of Izaya’s neck. “Okay,” he says, and then he tightens his hold around Izaya’s waist, and turns his head against Izaya’s hair, and presses his mouth in against the back of the other’s neck to leave the warm print of his mouth on cool skin.

He can’t see the expression on Izaya’s face any more than he can hear the nonexistent beat of his heart, but the other’s hold atop his hand doesn’t ease, and that’s enough comfort to let Shizuo drift into sleep with the comfort of Izaya cradled in the span of his arms.


	20. Fall

The night begins quietly.

Izaya is awake when Shizuo stirs into consciousness. Shizuo isn’t entirely certain Izaya has slept at all, isn’t sure Izaya needs rest in the first place; but he hasn’t moved away from Shizuo’s hold through all the hours of the day, is still lying within the curve of the other’s arm when Shizuo blinks himself awake as the light of day fades into the softer glow of evening around the edges of the blinds. Izaya’s hair is dark against the pillow, his chest still without the habitual rhythm of breathing against his ribs; but he shifts when Shizuo moves behind him, turns his head back when Shizuo ducks in to kiss at the nape of his neck, and instead of the protest Shizuo half-expected he offers a huff of air like a sigh, and a dip of his lashes like surrender as he turns back as if to press in for more contact. It’s more than Shizuo expected to have from him, after Izaya had hours to resettle into his sense of himself again; but the shift between them runs deeper than Shizuo expected, or maybe the simplicity of physical comfort is enough to override Izaya’s determined self-loathing, because he curves into the press of Shizuo’s lips at his uncannily cool skin, turning his head to grant the other access to the line of his throat and the part of his lips like he’s making an open offering of himself the moment Shizuo indicates a desire for such.

Shizuo tastes the curve of Izaya’s neck, pressing his mouth against the porcelain-cool of the other’s skin and breathing in deep to catch the bite of anise that even now seems to press against the smooth of Izaya’s body, and by the time he’s worked his way up to kiss at the soft part of the other’s mouth Izaya is breathing faster in spite of his complete lack of a need for oxygen, his chest working over reflexive inhales that give away the flush of rising want in him better even than the color starting to press itself against the line of his cheeks. Shizuo pulls Izaya back, turning him down flat over the bed as he reaches to press a hand over the other’s shoulder, as he shifts to fit a knee between the open angle of the other’s; but Izaya moves at that, finally, lifting his hands to catch at Shizuo’s shoulders with a force that is as much resistance as it is appreciative.

“We don’t have time,” he says, his eyes endless, his voice whisper-soft. “The sun will be going down soon.”

Shizuo stares at Izaya under him, at the part of his lips, at the forced shift of his chest on the rate of his breathing. He’s sure Izaya’s hard, is sure he could push the other down against the bed and drag him into an orgasm while the sun yet hangs on the horizon; but Izaya’s expression is unflinching, his eyes shadowed with something Shizuo can’t make sense of, and the excuse might be transparent but the _no_ is clear to parse, even if Shizuo doesn’t know the real reason.

“Okay,” Shizuo says finally, instead of the resistance he wants to offer. He tips his head to the side, feeling the shift of the motion pull a dull ache against the bruise of Izaya’s teeth at his skin as he moves. “Are you hungry?”

Izaya’s lashes dip, his gaze slides away from Shizuo’s eyes and down to his neck instead. Shizuo is expecting protest again, is expecting another repetition of how much of a monster Izaya is and how he ought to be left to his own devices instead of cared for; but Izaya surprises him again, leaving all the anticipated protests unspoken as he lets his hand slide up to curl against the back of Shizuo’s neck and draw the other down against him. Izaya’s body feels like glass, like he might shatter at too strong a touch or with the application of too much weight; but then he presses his mouth to Shizuo’s throat, and his teeth pierce through Shizuo’s skin, and all considerations of Izaya’s fragility disintegrate to the rush of heat that surges through Shizuo as his blood fills Izaya’s mouth and spills down his throat. Shizuo’s head weights at Izaya’s shoulder, his fingers clutch at the other’s hip, and when he opens his mouth it’s to moan into Izaya’s shirt, to voice helpless heat as his whole body shudders with the dizzy pleasure of Izaya drinking from him. He’s hard instantly, the beginnings of arousal that were stirring his cock half-full surging to heavy heat digging in hard at Izaya’s thigh between his legs, and he doesn’t have any chance to fight back the instinct that tells him to buck forward, to grind himself down against the other’s body in pursuit of satisfaction.

He wonders, distantly, if Izaya will push him off for the helpless need so clear in the whole of his body; but when the other’s hand shifts at his shoulder it’s to slide down instead of to shove him away, to trail over the tension in Shizuo’s chest and down to fit at the front of the other’s boxers, to grind back against the heat flushing Shizuo’s cock full against the press of Izaya’s fingers. Shizuo groans again, his body shoving in hard against Izaya’s touch; but Izaya’s hand doesn’t so much as shift, just offers unflinching resistance to spill the relief of friction into Shizuo’s veins. Shizuo is panting, his whole body rocking forward in desperate attempt for more, harder, faster; and then Izaya sucks hard at his neck, and Izaya’s thumb drags over the fabric pressing to the head of his cock, and Shizuo spasms into orgasm all at once, as if the dig of Izaya’s touch against him was an irrefutable order. His cock pulses heat against Izaya’s palm, the wet of it soaking through the thin fabric of his clothes to dampen the cool weight of the other’s skin, and against his neck Izaya draws a last mouthful of blood, just enough to drag Shizuo’s trembling aftershocks to sudden heights before he eases his teeth free and pulls away from the other’s skin.

Shizuo has to swallow twice at Izaya’s shoulder before he can find moisture enough to grant him speech. “Sorry,” he says, and his voice is rough in his throat as if he’s been shouting, as if he made far more sound than those two brief groans against Izaya’s shoulder. “I didn’t--”

“Don’t be stupid,” Izaya says, cutting off Shizuo’s protest before it’s fully formed even in the other’s head. “I wanted to make you come.” He slides his fingers up and away, leaving a chill of absence in his wake, and when he pushes at Shizuo’s shoulder again it’s a clear rejection as it wasn’t the first time. “Go wash up, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo goes. It doesn’t take him long to wash and change, when all he has to do is rinse and towel himself dry, but by the time he’s reemerging into the hotel room Izaya is perched on the edge of the chair in the corner instead of in bed, his coat and shoes on and his gaze fixed on the edge of the curtain drawn over the window instead of on Shizuo. He doesn’t look up as Shizuo comes into the room, doesn’t lift his attention from the focus he’s giving to the window; he doesn’t have the hard lines of misery drawn into his expression, but that’s the most information Shizuo can gather from the other. His mouth is soft, relaxed in a way that might be abstracted and might be a deliberate facade; it’s as impossible for Shizuo to tell as it is for him to get any information from the dark shadow of Izaya’s eyes. He hesitates at the bathroom door, the too-familiar pressure of concern forming itself around the steady rhythm of his breathing; but Izaya looks up before Shizuo can think what to say, his attention swinging around to the other as if Shizuo had called his name.

“You ready?” is all he says, with neither aggression nor teasing on the words; they’re just a question, inquiry framed around the bare outline of curiosity. It makes Shizuo frown, prickles uncertainty down his spine; but he can’t very well complain about Izaya being _too_ composed, and in the end all he says is “Yeah” as he steps forward to tug his own shoes on in imitation of the other. Izaya gets to his feet while Shizuo is getting ready, is waiting when Shizuo reaches for the door; he steps through without waiting as soon as Shizuo pulls the weight of it open, stepping out into the pale grey of new-fallen night without the least hesitation to be sure the sun is truly gone. It makes Shizuo flinch, his own instincts craving more certainty than Izaya’s clearly do; but it’s a sign of Izaya’s trust in him as much as anything else, and he’s not about to complain about that either.

Celty and Shinra meet them a few blocks away from their hotel. Celty frowns at Izaya, her forehead creasing on an echo of the same confusion Shizuo is feeling; but Shinra barely glances at Izaya before his attention is landing on Shizuo, his whole focus centering in on the line of the other’s neck.

“You ate!” he says, sounding inordinately pleased at this particular event. Shizuo lifts a hand without thinking to press his palm in over the bruised print of Izaya’s mouth at his skin, but it doesn’t make a difference; Shinra’s looking back to Izaya, beaming all over his face as if this is some charmingly novel event in the process of the other’s development. “You feel better for it, don’t you?”

“Shut up,” Izaya says, hissing the words with some indication of his usual force, and he shoves past Shinra without giving the other time to finish his sentence. Shinra is knocked off-balance and left to stumble across the sidewalk but he appears unfazed, only taking a moment to catch his footing before he’s turning to jog after Izaya.

“It was good, wasn’t it?” he asks, his cheer wholly unfazed by the other’s rejection. “Celty says she always feels better when she’s fed recently. Are you stronger? Faster?” He’s caught up to Izaya now, is blinking delighted interest at the other as he jogs alongside him. “Did Shizuo like it too? I know when Celty drinks from me I always--” and his words cut off into a muffled gurgle as shadows unfold themselves from the dark around them to close tight around his mouth and stem the flow of his words.

 _Sorry_ , Celty types, offering the screen to Shizuo as fast as she can touch the keys. Her skin is still moonlight pale, her features still crafted with delicate beauty, but between the set of her lips and the faint shadow across her cheeks Shizuo is left with a distinct impression of intense embarrassment. _He doesn’t know when to shut up_.

“It’s okay,” Shizuo says, feeling more than a little warm himself. “I know how it goes.”

 _Thanks_ , Celty types, and then she drags Shinra in towards her, closing a firm grip on his arm before ducking her head to type furiously over the keys of her phone in what Shizuo suspects to be a lengthy and one-sided lecture. Izaya doesn’t so much as glance back; he just continues down the street, hands in his pockets and gaze fixed straight ahead. From behind the only tell for his inhuman existence is the fluidity of his gait, the uncanny elegance of his movement as he strides forward; except he’s always had that, too, Shizuo thinks, Shizuo can recall noticing that same grace in an uncounted string of fights that happened at night from choice instead of necessity, marked by the flash of a bright smile that Shizuo could see without having to pry it free via an application of pure will. Shizuo’s chest tightens, aching over a shudder of loss at the relationship they had, at the easy partnership lost past retrieval now; but as quickly as the thought flickers through his mind he’s feeling the tension of the bite at his neck, remembering the fit of Izaya’s body against his this morning, and under him this evening, and his breathing catches to heat, his heart skidding against his ribs in a shiver of recollection as if Izaya’s lips are back against him now, as if his nose is pressed against the pale line of skin he can see between the collar of Izaya’s coat and his hair. It’s hardly a trade he would choose to make, if he had the option; but under the circumstances, it’s hard to say for certain he wants only the alternative.

Shizuo is thinking about the path of his history, thinking about the trajectory of Izaya’s life, thinking about the tangled mess that has become of the both of them together since that night a few days ago that feels like the lifetime it has been, at least for Izaya’s new existence. His attention is holding to the back of Izaya’s neck, to the elegant shift of the other’s shoulders under his coat rather than to the shadows around them; he’s not listening for the scuff of footsteps against the pavement, isn’t looking for the cast of unexpected shadows to give lie to some attempted ambush. He’s just staring, caught in his own imagination and memory too tightly to pull himself free, until even when there’s a voice it takes him a moment to make sense of the words.

“Aren’t you tired of playing this game yet?”

It’s not Izaya’s voice. That Shizuo is certain of immediately; no more is it Shinra’s, when he glances to see the other still caught in the haze of Celty’s shadows wound tight around him. The voice is too high, anyway, bright and sparkling like sunlight on water, and Shizuo’s whole body goes tense for a moment of shivering anticipation just as he turns back to the street and sees the figure standing in front of them.

He wasn’t there before. Of that Shizuo is sure; they’ve been holding to the quiet parts of town, and this street was as empty as those around it when they turned the corner to begin their usual procession down the pavement. But a figure has appeared, or maybe just moved too quickly for Shizuo’s distracted attention to note, and he’s here now, standing just a few feet in front of Izaya so the other must stop walking or run straight into him. Izaya does stop, instantly; in actual fact he rocks his whole weight backwards, flinching away with such obvious fear that Shizuo nearly expects him to actually fall back by a few steps. He doesn’t, not quite; and then Shizuo takes in the appearance of the figure in front of them, and all his thoughts go blank in the first wave of surprise.

It’s not the red eyes. Those Shizuo anticipated, from the initial statement as much as the approach late at night; they’re all but to be expected, from the situation and after the last time they were approached by a stranger. It’s something else, something in the upward angle of the smile, or some predatory weight to the pattern of the footsteps, or maybe the colorful scarf wrapped around the other’s neck that pings some recognition far back in Shizuo’s head, that stalls everything else that he might say into a single, breathless word. “ _You_.”

Scarlet eyes jump away from Izaya, skim Shizuo for a brief, insultingly dismissive moment. “Hey there,” the vampire -- the Servamp -- says, his smile going wider for a moment. It’s uncannily sweet, like a child excited at seeing a new toy, more in keeping with the idle wave he gives than with the sharp edges of his teeth or the vicious crimson of his eyes. “You been having fun with my subclass? I was kind of hoping he would kill you when you tried to save him and then stay there for the sun, but I guess his survival instinct is stronger than I gave him credit for.” He looks back to Izaya, his head tipping as his smile spreads into something disarmingly close to pride. “You make a much better vampire than I thought you would.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Izaya says. He doesn’t even make it sound like a threat; it’s a statement, an observation, honesty cold and unusual on his tongue. It makes Shizuo’s spine prickle with foreboding.

The Servamp laughs. “That’s what you’ve been saying,” he says, rocking back on his heels and looking far more amused than afraid. “Just like you killed my subclass, is that it?” His expression flickers for a moment, his smile fading; for a heartbeat of time he looks dangerous, deadly as an open blade or a loaded gun. “The only person I’ll ever let get away with that is my Eve.”

“Your Eve kills your subclasses?” Shizuo asks, more to pull the intent focus of that gaze back to himself instead of on Izaya and the tension he can see building to an open threat in the line of the other’s shoulders.

The Servamp waves his hand. “Sure, yeah, he kills a lot of people.” He smiles, his expression falling into that flicker of childlike pleasure again for a moment. “I pay him back for it, of course.”

“Hello!”

The voice comes from behind Shizuo, over his shoulder where he left the other pair of their group caught in their hissed conversation. Shinra is beaming when he turns to look, his hand upraised over his head as he waves a greeting to the other.

“Hello, hello!” he repeats, stepping forward with complete disregard for the grab Celty makes at his sleeve to hold him back. “You must be Celty’s brother Aoba!”

The Servamp’s mouth twists on something not-quite a smile, his eyes darken into shadow for a breath. “Must I?” he asks. “I don’t particularly think of myself as anyone’s brother. Siblings are a bit of a pain, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know!” Shinra chirps back without missing a beat. “I’m an only child. But if I had the opportunity to call Celty my sister I’d jump at the chance!”

The Servamp snorts. “Isn’t that a little close to sis-con?” he asks, and then, waving a hand to stifle whatever else Shinra is about to say, “Look, I’ll talk to you later. I have to deal with my rebellious kid first. Are you two on his side as well?”

“I suppose,” Shinra says without any real conviction or hesitation on the words. “We’ve definitely been travelling with him, but I’m not sure if Celty is really up for joining in on the fight.”

“I don’t need your help,” Izaya says, his voice a steel blade dripping ice. “I never needed your help. You can take a seat and be the audience if you want, I don’t care.”

Shizuo frowns at Izaya’s shoulders. This is too close to the last time, to the fight that ended with blood spilling over the pavement and Izaya’s hands shaking too badly for him to steady. His memory reminds him of a _crack_ echoing off shadowed walls, of dark eyes gone blank and sightless in a familiar face, of the weight of Izaya’s body limp and unmoving in his arms; Shizuo has to blink hard to clear his mind of the recollection, has to shake his head to drag himself back to the present. “Izaya, you should--”

“Alright!” Shinra declares. “Come on, Celty, let’s get a safe distance away!” Celty hesitates for a moment, Shizuo can see the uncertainty clear over her face when he looks back; but Shinra’s stepping in close, and reaching for her sleeve, and as Celty’s attention slides away from Shizuo and Izaya and to the other Servamp Shizuo can see her expression harden into a defensive wall, can see her posture steady and stabilize as she takes a step in to fit her shoulder between Shinra and the other vampire. Shinra doesn’t seem to notice the motion at all, but Aoba does; he’s grinning when Shizuo looks back to him, watching the other pair step aside with unabashed amusement in his expression.

“There’s two out of the way,” he says, and then he looks back to Shizuo, just for a moment before his gaze slides back to Izaya. “Still want your boyfriend there to be part of this? He’s going to be completely outclassed by the two of us.”

“This has nothing to do with him,” Izaya says, and Shizuo knows he’s speaking for the benefit of the Servamp but the cold distance in the other’s tone is still enough to prickle stress all down the length of Shizuo’s spine. “This is me putting down a monster.”

Aoba shrugs, tipping his head to the side as he heaves a sigh as melodramatic as it is unnecessary. “Suit yourself,” he says, and then he’s gone, just like that, vanished as he’s just stopped existing in the visible world anymore. Except he’s not, of course, he’s just -- and Izaya stumbles, knocked off-balance by the force of a blow so fast Shizuo didn’t even see the attack. Shizuo’s heart seizes, he takes a jerky step forward; but there’s no time to react, there’s no time even to call out a warning, because Izaya is moving too, faster than he did in that first fight, faster than Shizuo’s ever seen him, as if the heat of the fresh blood running through his veins is pushing his whole existence into doubletime. There’s a flicker of movement, the color of the Servamp’s scarf a blur in the air, the sweep of a shadow as Izaya’s coat flares with his motion; for a moment they pause, long enough for Shizuo to see the blade Izaya has drawn from his pocket, long enough for Shizuo to see the wide-eyed focus on the other’s face just before the Servamp swings in to shove the force of an arm hard against Izaya’s throat. Izaya jerks with the impact, his mouth opening in a soundless gasp for air, and then he’s moving again, darting backwards as if to regain enough time to compose himself from the loss of the breath he doesn’t need. Izaya is fast, he’s almost impossible to follow for Shizuo’s gaze; but Aoba is faster, he might as well be invisible for all that Shizuo can see him. The only evidence he has of the other’s presence are the injuries blooming across Izaya’s body, the set of scratches trickling blood against his neck and the stumbling limp he takes from a kick smashing against his kneecap. Izaya’s movements are slowing, Shizuo can see him for full seconds at a time now; he sees the punch Izaya takes against an upraised arm, hears the _snap_ of a steel-hard bone giving way to an impossible force, sees the blow that slams against the small of the other’s back to send him stumbling forward to collapse to the ground. Izaya grimaces at the impact, twists his hand still gripping the knife to brace at the ground and push himself to upright; and a shadow flickers in front of Shizuo’s vision, the lithe figure of the Servamp coming to a halt between Shizuo and his view of Izaya.

“I don’t know what you were thinking,” Aoba says conversationally, his tone perfectly chipper as he leans over Izaya’s fallen form. Shizuo can hear Izaya gasp protest as he’s dragged up by the Servamp’s grip on his coat hood, can see him struggling to break free as Aoba pulls him upright. He still has the knife in his grip, is still trying to twist to stab at the other; but Aoba is reaching to close his hand around Izaya’s wrist, his fingers tightening against the other’s arm with the same certain grip that Shizuo saw when he braced his hands at Izaya’s head during their first fight, just before that awful sound Shizuo is sure he’ll never be able to free himself from. “I _made_ you, you’re created from _my_ blood. How on earth were you ever going to be able to beat me?”

Izaya coughs. It’s a wet sound, Shizuo can hear the blood on it; when he lifts his head to the washed-out illumination of the streetlights Shizuo can see the color staining the other’s lips, the crimson of his own blood spilling from the corner of Izaya’s mouth to trickle against the pale of his chin.

“I wasn’t,” he says, and then his mouth curves up into brief, startling happiness, a giveaway for something so bright and clear that it runs through Shizuo like electricity, like the dawn surging free of the horizon with the advent of day. “It’s not just me.” And his gaze drops over Aoba’s shoulder, his attention sliding away from the Servamp’s face to Shizuo’s, standing frozen just behind the other; standing just within arm’s reach of their opponent. “You forgot about my partner.”

It’s not that Shizuo is faster than the Servamp. He’s not. There’s no way he’d be able to catch Aoba left to his own devices, no way he’d ever be able to land a proper blow against the other’s inhuman form. It’s just that the Servamp has stepped right in next to him, has been so focused on kicking damage into Izaya’s body that he forgot all about Shizuo, until all Shizuo has to do is reach out, slow as if in a dream, to close his hand on the Servamp’s shoulder, and tighten his grip past the point of breaking, and drag the other back in against the resistance of his chest.

“ _What_ ,” Aoba spits, and his cheer has evaporated, it’s given way to vicious disbelief as he jerks hard against Shizuo’s hold on him. “What the _fuck_ , you can’t…” but Shizuo can, Shizuo _is_ , he can feel the effort of the Servamp’s struggles to break free but Izaya is pulling free, Izaya is lifting his hand to wipe the blood from the corner of his mouth with some measure of his usual grace returning to him, and Shizuo thinks he could hold the Servamp back if he were struggling twice as hard just for the sake of keeping the other from further injury.

“You shouldn’t underestimate humans,” Izaya says, his tone far more conversational than Shizuo has heard it in days, since that awful dark night when they first encountered this particular opponent. “Shizu-chan is a lot stronger than he looks.”

“Get the _fuck_ off me,” the Servamp hisses, trying to kick behind him to get traction against Shizuo’s knee; Shizuo lifts him off the ground by an inch, steadies his hold on the other’s shoulder, and Aoba hisses incoherent fury at him. “Put me _down_.”

“You have a contract item,” Izaya says, and he’s stepping in closer, his focus centered once again on the Servamp instead of Shizuo holding the other back from him. Aoba gets his leg up to attempt a kick at Izaya’s stomach but Izaya just steps backwards, his footsteps far lighter than they ought to be with how badly he seemed to be limping before. His arm is still slack at his side -- that injury, at least, appears unfeigned -- but he doesn’t pay it any attention, just continues to stare at the Servamp in Shizuo’s hold like he’s trying to figure out what blow to land first to do maximum damage. “What is it?”

“Fuck _you_ ,” the Servamp hisses. “I’m not going to _tell_ you, what kind of an idiot do you think I am?”

“You don’t have to!” The voice is clear, bright, as distant from the tension of the situation as the sky is from the earth; Shizuo turns his head to look just as Shinra steps in close at his elbow, his eyes alight with interest and his whole face beaming excitement. “I can make a good guess anyway. You’re not very subtle about it, are you?” And he’s reaching past Shizuo’s hold, his fingers stretching out over the distance between himself and the Servamp to curl in around the brilliant blue scarf tucked into the collar of the other’s shirt. Aoba hisses an inhale, the sound raw enough on panic to provide an answer to Shinra’s rhetorical question and a warning to Shizuo at once; Shizuo tightens his hold, bracing himself hard just before Aoba lashes into a frenzied attempt to break free as Shinra drags the fabric free of his collar.

“ _Stop_ ,” he screams, his voice echoing off the walls around them into a cacophony of furious rage more than panic. “I’ll _kill_ you, I’ll drain you dry, I’ll make your Servamp watch you die, I _swear_ I will.”

“Hm?” Shinra looks up from the square of blue fabric in his hands, his head cocking to the side like he’s listening to some fascinating sound. “I just wanted to look at it and you’re threatening Celty?” His mouth curves onto a smile, sincerity without any warmth to go with it as he stares at the Servamp. “Well, that makes things easy at least.” And he braces his hands at the edge of the cloth, dragging hard at the fibers of the fabric. The square strains, resisting his pull for a moment; and then gives way, tearing apart with a _rip_ that sounds with remarkable clarity against the quiet of the night.

Aoba _shrieks_. It’s full-throated, full-bodied, his entire form arching sharply back against Shizuo’s hold; his limbs flail into desperate tension, an unformed convulsion of pain more than a sincere attempt to break free. Shizuo thinks he would have collapsed to the pavement without the other’s hold on him; as it is Shizuo can feel the tension lacing the other’s body to rigidity, can feel the vibration of that scream thrumming through his own chest with the chill awareness of someone else’s agony too distant to feel himself but too immediate to ignore.

Izaya seems to have no such awareness. He’s moving in, stepping in close to the pain-contorted frame of his maker with complete disregard for the accidental blows from the other’s hands and feet that land at him. There’s still blood smeared over his mouth, still the weight of injury bearing his arm to his side; but his good hand is clutched around the handle of his knife, and his gaze is fixed unswervingly on Aoba’s face as he steps in close enough to pin the other between his body and Shizuo’s.

“This is for me,” he says, the words low with no consideration for the echo of Aoba’s screaming shattering itself against the walls of the buildings around them; and then he brings his knife up, and draws it hard across the Servamp’s throat, and the sound of the other’s agony breaks off into a wet burble of liquid instead. Blood spills over Shizuo’s bracing hands, coating his skin and soaking into the sleeves of his shirt, but Izaya doesn’t pull back from the rush of liquid; he stays close, doesn’t so much as blink as the wet soaks into the lining of his coat to turn the lighter fur there as dark as the rest of it. The Servamp’s struggles weaken, his body goes heavy; and then he shudders, and falls still, and Shizuo lets his now-needless restraint on the other go. He collapses to the ground, eyes wide and unseeing as he falls, and for a moment Shizuo and Izaya are left standing over the remains of Izaya’s creator, and the proof of the other’s successful revenge.

Izaya takes a deep breath. “Thank you,” he says, his voice deliberately clear, like crystal in the pale light of the moon overhead. When Shizuo lifts his gaze to look at him Izaya’s not watching him; he’s standing very still, and very straight, his head ducked down to look at the shape of the Servamp before him. “I’m grateful, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo doesn’t know what it is that tips him off. Maybe it’s the deliberate stability of Izaya’s shoulders, or the angled-out brace of his feet, like he’s holding himself up through force of will more than ability. Maybe it’s the way the knife in his hand slides free of his fingers, dropping to the ground as Shizuo has never seen him drop a weapon before. Or it’s just his voice itself, the pristine, careful clarity of it, like he’s carving his words from moonlight and ice to stand as some kind of permanent testament in lieu of more immediate warmth.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, his voice tightening over concern in the back of his throat as a frown drags at his lips, as his forehead creases on worry. He reaches out for Izaya’s good arm, stretching over the gap between them so he can touch his fingers to the other’s sleeve, so he can wind his hand into a hold at Izaya’s wrist before he does whatever it is he’s about to do. “What’s wrong?” His fingers curl in around Izaya’s empty hand; Izaya doesn’t return the pressure of his grip, doesn’t move his hand at all. Shizuo might as well be touching a doll for all the response he receives. “You did it.”

Izaya’s breath rushes out of him in a rush. “Yes,” he says. “I did it.” And then he lifts his head, and his eyes are bright with more than their new, uncanny color, they’re shining like glass with the liquid caught at the dark of his lashes. His forehead creases, his mouth curves up into lopsided softness; Shizuo has never seen him look so gentle before.

“I can’t keep my promise,” he says, forming the words so carefully at his lips Shizuo can see the shape of them clear against the shift of the other’s mouth. “I lied. Sorry, Shizu-chan.” And then there’s a shudder of wind, enough to gust a spill of ash away from the Servamp’s fallen form, and Izaya’s lashes dip, and his body gives way so abruptly it’s only Shizuo diving forward for him that lets him catch the other’s weight before he hits the ground.

Shizuo is very sure the ice in his veins is more than enough to match the chill in Izaya’s.


	21. Bleed

Izaya is dying.

Shizuo can feel it. There’s no heartbeat to track, no motion of the other’s chest to stare at as a sign of life fading into the weight of an unbearable loss; the first time did for both of those the same as they did for the heat of Izaya’s skin, to leave him to the existence he has claimed is monstrous and Shizuo can’t imagine doing without. This isn’t a matter of something as simple as a stuttering pulse or slowing breathing; this is in the tremor Shizuo can feel running through the body in his arms, in the color fading as fast from Izaya’s lips as if it’s his blood draining over the sidewalk instead of his creator’s, in the light dimming behind his eyes as fast as Shizuo thinks to look for it. Shizuo’s heart is racing, his whole body tensing with the need for action, for movement, for some kind of resistance to the inevitability of what’s happening; but Izaya’s gaze is losing focus, Izaya’s body is going slack, and all the strength in the world can’t hold him here when Shizuo doesn’t even know why he’s fading in the first place.

“ _Izaya_ ,” Shizuo’s saying, Shizuo’s screaming, Shizuo’s voice is breaking open and turning the other’s name into a shout against the night-dark walls as if to push away the impending threat of loss, as if to serve as a tether to pull Izaya back from that mortality that he seemed to have entirely shed with his change. “Don’t, don’t you dare, _Izaya_ you _can’t do this_.”

“Shizu-chan,” Izaya says, or makes the shape of on his lips; Shizuo’s pulse is echoing too loud in his ears for him to hear the sound that goes with the outline of his name, even if Izaya had the air in his lungs to grant it voice. Izaya’s head is tipping back, the pale line of his throat curving up like he’s offering himself for the glowing weight of the moonlight over him; Shizuo’s gaze lands at the unmoving porcelain of the curve, his desperate mind latches onto the possibility of a solution, a remedy, anything so long as it’s him taking action to hold Izaya here, to this existence, with him.

“Don’t,” he says, and he’s pulling Izaya in against his chest, holding him there with one arm so he can struggle to unfasten the sleeve of his shirt, so he can force the cuff up off the lines of veins carrying blood through his body with every beat of his heart. “What do you need, Izaya, do you need to drink?” He offers his wrist, hoping with desperate force for the drag of teeth, for the piercing heat that comes with Izaya’s mouth on him; but Izaya doesn’t even lift his head, doesn’t so much as shift to track the flutter of Shizuo’s pulse in his wrist. His eyes are going grey, Shizuo can see the color draining out of them as fast as it vanishes from Izaya’s lips; all his uncanny coloring is giving way to ashen pale, his hair and his mouth and his skin and--

“You should move” a voice offers with conversational calm a moment before a hand lands hard at Shizuo’s shoulder, before fingers close with aggressive force over his shirt. Shizuo’s head comes up, his attention dragged up by the sheer shock of the contact if nothing else, and there’s a phone in his face, _MOVE_ written in capital-letter haste across the screen. He blinks, startled out of his all-consuming panic for a moment of confusion, and it’s in that momentary pause that Celty is dropping to her knees alongside him and grabbing at Izaya’s shoulder to drag him out of Shizuo’s arms to lie flat on the pavement. There’s dust underneath them, the fast-scattering remains of Izaya’s maker blowing away with every new gust of wind, but Celty doesn’t pay any more attention to it than Shizuo does. She’s leaning over Izaya instead, dropping her phone to the sidewalk and reaching out to press both hands to the sides of the other’s face instead, turning his face up to the illumination of the full moon overhead.

“What are you doing?” Shizuo asks, and then, before Celty has time to answer, “What’s wrong with him?”

It’s Shinra who replies, offering easy voice to the answer as he steps in to stand just at Shizuo’s elbow. “It’s his creator,” he says, sounding only half-interested in what he’s saying as he leans over to collect the dropped phone from the ground. “I can’t believe you let this go so easily, Celty, don’t you care about our bond at all?”

Shizuo growls incoherent frustration at Shinra’s distraction. “What _about_ his creator?”

Shinra looks back to him, blinking wide-eyed like he’s surprised Shizuo didn’t understand everything from his single oblique comment. “He killed him,” he says, lifting a hand to gesture vaguely to the dust scattering across the street. “Subclasses are bound to their creators, they experience whatever damage their maker does.” He lifts a shoulder in a careless shrug. “I guess it’s to stop them from doing what your partner there decided to do.”

Shizuo’s spine prickles into chill, his whole awareness going cold and crystalline with sudden, painfully clear understanding. “He--” He blinks hard, swallows harder. “Did he know?”

“Of course he knew,” Shinra says. “They’re linked to each other, he couldn’t have _not_ known. Or suspected, at least. I’m sure that’s why he’s been so determined to hunt his maker down.”

“You _knew_ ,” Shizuo says, and he’s surging to his feet, grabbing at the collar of Shinra’s coat and heaving him bodily off his feet to slam him back against the wall of the building alongside the sidewalk where Celty is still leaning over Izaya. Shinra’s breath gusts out of him, his head knocks back against the resistance behind him, but Shizuo doesn’t give him time to react or to voice any kind of protest; there’s too much rage in him, too much betrayed horror burning like painful sunlight in his veins. “You _knew_ I was helping him to _kill_ himself and you didn’t _tell_ me?”

“You didn’t ask,” Shinra gasps, and then, lifting his hands as Shizuo growls and his hands curl tighter: “I thought he would have told you! Did you really spend all those days together without him saying anything at all?”

“He _never_ \--” Shizuo starts, and then he has to stop, because his memory is surging higher to make a liar of him. _When I’m done_ , Izaya had said, with that strange tension on his voice and against his fingers, and _we don’t have time_ , and moments ago, with his whole face going soft on apology, _I can’t keep my promise_ with his liar’s eyes glowing brilliant crimson like the rush of blood beating in Shizuo’s heart. This evening, with Izaya’s strange silence and stranger distance, and even this morning, with _love_ bright on Shizuo’s lips and a huff of response that sounds like resignation, now, when Shizuo looks back on it. Shizuo’s hold eases, his anger fades, and suddenly there’s a knot in the back of his throat, there are tears threatening behind his eyes as he lets Shinra drop back to stand on his own feet on the ground.

“Thanks,” the other says, his tone barely dipping over the edge into the start of sarcasm. He pulls his coat straight over his shoulders and looks away from Shizuo without any indication of noticing or caring about the other’s emotional turmoil. “Are you going to be able to save him, Celty?”

It takes Shizuo a moment to make sense of the words. He’s caught in his own memories, lost in the tangle of his dawning epiphany and the desperate attempt of his sanity to think about the past, about the present, about anything other than the empty shadows of a future helplessly, hopelessly alone. But then the meaning of Shinra’s voice settles into his awareness, and hope breaks over him so suddenly he’s turning before he’s fully processed it, his breathing catching on startled disbelief as quickly as he stumbles forward to fall to his knees alongside Celty bent over Izaya. She has her hand bracing at the back of the Izaya’s dust-dark hair, her fingers spread wide to support the boneless weight of the other’s head; Izaya’s lashes are shut, his skin still that ghastly pale it was when Shizuo seized onto Shinra’s coatfront. But his lips are red now, scarlet with the stain of color borrowed from the slow drip of Celty’s wrist, where the marks of sharp canines show the self-inflicted bite wound from her own teeth.

“I don’t know if it’ll work,” Shinra says, leaning in close over the other three with curiosity absent any personal interest clear on his tone. “I’ve never heard of a Servamp claiming another’s dying subclass before. She might have been too late to get to him, anyway. Maybe if it were a transfusion done at the exact same time as the maker is killed--” and that’s as far as he gets before shadows uncurl from Celty’s shoulders to bind him into silence. There’s a mumble of sound as Shinra attempts to keep talking for a moment; and then he goes silent, and there’s nothing to hear along the whole of the street but the rush of the wind and the desperate thud of Shizuo’s heartbeat echoing in his ears.

There’s nothing for what feels like minutes, what is probably mere seconds. Izaya’s mouth is as stained with Celty’s blood as the front of his coat is with Aoba’s; other than that he’s ghostly pale, his hair and skin drained to papery fragility until Shizuo feels as if he ought to be protected from the drag of the wind ruffling the collar of his coat against his skin. Shizuo can’t breathe, can’t find air for the panic seizing against his chest; his mind is reeling, keeps spinning over _what if_ s that Shizuo cuts off in his own mind with aggressive force as if he can reject reality if he keeps his imagination in check. Izaya will be okay, this will work, he’s going to make it; but he can’t think why any of that should be the case, except that he needs it to be, except that he can’t face the rest of his empty life with blood on his hands and ash in his lungs. So he stares at Izaya instead, fixing the other with unblinking attention as if to hold him to existence through sheer force of will alone; and then Izaya shudders, his whole body trembling against the hold Celty has on him, and Shizuo gasps a breath to fill the whole of his tense chest with panicked oxygen.

“ _Izaya_ ” and he’s reaching out, his hands moving of their own accord to touch at Izaya’s hair, face, mouth, shoulders, whatever of the other he can reach. Celty heaves a soundless exhale and leans away, making an offer of the bracing hold she has at Izaya’s head until Shizuo takes the other’s weight and slides in to take Celty’s place curled in over Izaya. Izaya’s lashes are fluttering, his throat working on some soundless reaction; Shizuo can’t stop touching him, can’t stop skimming his fingers feather-light over the sharp lines of Izaya’s features. The other’s skin is still ghostly pale, his lips still stained to that feverish red by the print of Celty’s blood across them; but his hair is darker, his lashes dipping back towards inky shadow, and as Shizuo’s fingertips brush over that porcelain-white skin some flicker of color follows in their wake, some proof of existence rising back to the surface of Izaya’s skin in echoing answer to Shizuo’s touch against him.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says again, feeling the jolt of his heart start to stammer on relief instead of terror, on the surge of hope in his chest instead of the stomach-dropping fear of loss. “Can you hear me? Can you speak?”

Izaya shifts and licks against the crimson stain on his lips. “Shizu-chan,” he manages, and then his lashes shift, his eyes open to drift over Shizuo’s features before settling to meet the other’s gaze. “I didn’t think I’d get to see you crying over me twice in one lifetime.”

“I’m not crying,” Shizuo chokes past the knot in his throat. His hold around Izaya’s shoulders tightens, his fingers tense against the dark of the other’s hair. “Are you okay?”

“I’m not dead,” Izaya says. “That’s more than I thought I could hope for.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo says, and his chest seizes tight on an unavoidable sob, on a surge of emotion too sharp for him to process. “I can’t _believe_ you pulled me into your suicide mission without _telling_ me.”

Izaya’s mouth twists at the corner, tugging up into the flicker of a smile. “You wouldn’t have helped if you knew,” he says, and then he’s lifting his injured arm as fast as Celty’s blood heals it, stretching pale fingers out to skim against Shizuo’s cheek and weight against the other’s jaw. “I wanted to keep you as long as I could.”

“You’re a selfish bastard,” Shizuo informs him, aiming for a growl and only barely attaining coherency around the hiccuping force of tears climbing his throat.

Izaya’s mouth shifts again. “I know,” he says, and his hand presses in close against the side of Shizuo’s neck, his thumb landing possessively just over the other’s pulse. “What are you gonna do, kill me?”

“No,” Shizuo says, and he leans in, and presses his mouth to Izaya’s in active demonstration of what he’s going to do instead.

Izaya’s smile against his mouth is weak, but his hold at Shizuo’s neck is stronger than it’s ever been before.


	22. Stay

Shizuo doesn’t let go of Izaya.

It’s a necessity, for the first few minutes. Whatever miracle Celty achieved may have saved Izaya from following his original maker into true death, but he’s still left trembling and so weak that Shizuo can feel the whole of the other’s weight in his arms, can feel the need for support in the heavy fall of Izaya’s head against his arm and the desperate force of the hand at his neck until Shizuo thinks it’s as much Izaya’s stubbornness keeping his hold there as an actual application of strength. When Shinra suggests leaving before someone comes to investigate the sound of the fight, Shizuo thinks he’s going to have to pick Izaya up bodily to allow them to move any distance at all; but Izaya clutches at the back of his neck, and drags himself to sit upright by force, and if Shizuo can feel the effort in the other’s hold on him he doesn’t say anything about it, just slides his arm down and around Izaya’s waist to support him as they get to their feet. He really _is_ supporting him -- more than half the other’s weight is braced around his shoulders, Shizuo thinks, and Izaya’s balance is so questionable his strength to stand is only an afterthought -- but it’s not any kind of a problem Shizuo plans to give voice to. He’d rather have Izaya here anyway, caught in the span of his hold and with the other’s arm looping heavy around his neck, where he can know without a doubt that Izaya is safe, and whole, and going to continue in both of those for the foreseeable future.

Shinra takes them to a hotel. It’s early, barely into the late hours of the night and a long span of time from the threat that comes with the dawn; but Shizuo thinks this might be some kind of thoughtfulness on the other’s part, and his suspicions are confirmed when Shinra steps up to the front desk to ask for a pair of rooms instead of just one. Shizuo’s not going to complain. He doesn’t want anything as much as he wants a dark room and a locked door to take himself and Izaya away from the world for as long as they can stand, and nearly a full day in seclusion sounds like a dream come true under the circumstances. The young woman working the front desk eyes Izaya twice, her attention more held by the slack line of his shoulders and the obvious support Shizuo is offering than the shadow-dark of the coats Celty has made for them to cover the crimson of the blood staining them both, and when she hands Shinra the keycards she nods towards Izaya and aims her speech at Shizuo.

“He should drink some water,” she says, in the confident tones of someone who has more than a little experience with overindulgence herself. “We can send up some food, too, if he’s hungry.”

Shizuo very nearly laughs aloud. It’s hysteria, he thinks, it’s the exhaustion and stress and relief of the night all coming together to threaten his throat with the pressure of irrepressible amusement; he only barely manages to press his lips together before the sound breaks free, and even then it comes out as a snort with far more humor than the situation really deserves.

“No,” he says, and as an afterthought: “thanks,” because the girl is looking at him with a crease at her forehead and the start of a frown at her mouth, and he doesn’t actually mean to be rude even if he lacks the strength to muster real politeness. “I’ve taken care of him before, I can handle it tonight.” That makes Shinra laugh out loud, the sound of his amusement bubbling bright against the walls of the hotel lobby; but at least the sound pulls the girl’s attention away to him instead of on Shizuo, and gives Shizuo the opportunity to claim one of the keycards and escape.

Izaya stays quiet. Shizuo isn’t sure if it’s from a sincere desire for silence or just the exhaustion of effort that comes with his movement demanding the full application of his attention, but in any case he doesn’t say anything at all, even after Shizuo has steered them into an empty elevator and set the button to carry them up to their assigned floor. The only allowance he makes is once the doors have slid shut, when the heavy weight of them removes the possibility of an audience for at least a few seconds, and then it’s to turn in closer to Shizuo, to stumble his unsteady steps around and lift his other hand to catch both arms around Shizuo’s neck like he’s making an offering of the whole weight of his body to the other’s hold. Shizuo hesitates for a moment, uncertain as to how much Izaya is willing to let him have; but when he lifts his hand to touch Izaya’s hip the other leans in closer against him, and huffs a sound like relief at his shoulder, and Shizuo can’t resist the temptation of that even if he tried. He turns his head in, pressing his nose against the dark of Izaya’s hair as he catches both arms close around the slender lines of the other’s body, and he’s grateful to the upper floor of their room for the extra seconds of travel time it grants them.

Their room is near the elevators. Izaya doesn’t let go as the doors come open, and there’s no audience to give him any reason to balk even if he were able to bear his own weight; from the way Shizuo is all but carrying him, he suspects their closeness to be as much from necessity as from desire. It doesn’t make a difference; Shizuo is happy to have Izaya, happy to _still_ have him, even after everything, and it’s easy enough to manage the door to their room one-handed. He lets the keycard drop as the door latches shut behind them, forgetting where it falls as fast as it drops in favor of replacing his hold on Izaya, of catching the other’s precarious balance in both his arms, of lifting his hand up to cradle the back of the other’s head and wind his fingers into the soft fall of dark hair.

“Izaya,” he starts, and that’s all he has to offer, his words die out to a huff of pained relief that carries far more meaning than he could ever hope to put into coherency. His eyes are burning, he can feel the ache of delayed-reaction tears threatening the ease of his breathing, but he can’t stop them even if he wanted to, can’t ease the strain in his throat any more than he can ease the hold of his arms on Izaya against him. He presses in closer against Izaya’s hair, ducking his head so he can breathe in hard against the other’s neck, and Izaya shifts against him, turning in like he’s looking for a kiss, until his lips are brushing the curve of Shizuo’s ear. There’s a hiss of sound, the whisper-thin drag of an inhale against Shizuo’s skin; and then Izaya ducks his head, his mouth sliding over Shizuo’s jaw and down, and Shizuo shuts his eyes in unvoiced surrender to what he knows is coming.

He wonders if he’ll ever get used to the heat of it, if maybe after years of repetition he might be able to learn some measure of composure for the feel of Izaya’s teeth breaking through his skin, for the drag of Izaya’s throat working to pull blood from his veins and over the other’s tongue. He doubts it -- it’s too much, too immediate, too all-encompassing -- but even if he does someday attain some level of restraint it’s not today, and right now he doesn’t stand any chance of holding himself back to calm. His whole body shudders, he can feel the heat shake itself through every part of his being while his throat opens up on a groan, while his hands clench tighter against Izaya in his arms, and Izaya is pressing closer, letting the weight of his body fall to the support of Shizuo’s hold as his hand slides up into Shizuo’s hair, as his mouth presses hot to Shizuo’s throat. Shizuo’s hold at Izaya’s waist slides down, his hand fumbling reflexively for more intimacy, for more contact, and as his palm drags over the curve of the other’s ass Izaya arches up closer, letting his weight go to Shizuo’s support so he can loop his arms around the other’s neck and hook a leg against Shizuo’s hip. Shizuo can’t help but pull the heat of Izaya’s body in closer against him, can’t help but whimper at the resistance of Izaya’s cock digging in hard against his hips, and Izaya is wrapping close around him, catching both his legs around Shizuo’s waist while Shizuo is still stumbling in pursuit of balance for the both of them. Shizuo nearly falls before he can catch himself, wobbling precariously before he gets both arms around Izaya to hold him in closer, and at his neck Izaya pulls away for a moment, gasping a lungful of air before he says “Bed,” so close against the other’s skin that Shizuo would swear he can feel the drag of the sound more than hear it. Shizuo nods, obedience coming easy and unthinking in the moment, and stumbles forward to run them up against the edge of the neatly-made bed in front of them. Izaya’s fingers tighten in Shizuo’s hair, Izaya’s breath rushes out against Shizuo’s neck, and Shizuo’s falling forward, his balance giving way as fast as the strength of his body surrenders to the suggestion of Izaya’s touch against him. He tries to catch himself, to save Izaya from the full weight of Shizuo’s body landing atop him, but Izaya doesn’t ease his hold, and when Shizuo does crush him down against the bed the sound he makes is one far closer to heat than to pain.

“Sorry,” Shizuo says, but the apology is reflexive, it comes without any thought at all; he’s not sure he’s able to think through any of his actions, at this point, with Izaya wound so close around him and the promise of a bed soft under their bodies. He pulls back for a moment, just long enough to see the soft of Izaya’s damp-stained coat under him -- Celty must have withdrawn her shadows, Shizuo hadn’t even noticed it happening -- before Izaya’s hand at the back of his neck tightens, the other’s grip bracing him still with inhuman strength and effectively halting any attempt Shizuo might make to pull away.

“Stay,” Izaya says, and his voice makes it a command but his eyes are pulling the word into a plea, his lashes are heavy with so much desperate want his expression could serve as a mirror for Shizuo’s. “Don’t go.”

“I’m not,” Shizuo says. Izaya is reaching for the front of his shirt with his free hand, his fingers catching and dragging at the buttons of Shizuo’s shirt; Shizuo’s heart is pounding, his blood thrumming in his veins as if ready to offer itself to spill hot over Izaya’s fingers, but all Izaya is doing is unfastening the fabric over his shoulders to fall loose over the bare skin of his chest. He’s not even watching what he’s doing; his gaze is flickering over Shizuo’s face instead, his attention sticking to all the details of the other’s expression as if working his shirt off is a secondary priority and not the first. Shizuo can’t catch his breath, he can’t look away from Izaya’s eyes on him. “I’ll stay, I’m staying with you.”

Izaya’s lashes flutter, his breath catches, as if he wasn’t expecting this answer, as if this can be anything like a surprise after what they’ve been through the last few days. “Good,” he says, and his hand is sliding down, his fingers are pressing against Shizuo over the barrier of his pants like he’s testing the outline of the other’s body, like he’s tracing over the heat of him to explore the resistance of Shizuo’s cock against his palm, like he’s trying to coax the startled gust of air from Shizuo’s lungs and the short, helpless thrust forward Shizuo makes against his palm. “Keep going.”

Shizuo doesn’t know which part Izaya is referring to. He might mean the spill of commitment from Shizuo’s lips, the words forming themselves so close around sincerity that Shizuo doesn’t have to think about speaking as much as open his mouth and set the confession of his speech free. Maybe he’s talking about the force of Shizuo bucking against his hand, the obvious surge of physical desire that is stealing Shizuo’s breath and leaving him shaking with the need to press his mouth to Izaya’s, to weight his body to Izaya’s, to fit himself as irretrievably close to the other as he can. Maybe he’s talking about the fit of Shizuo’s fingers to his hip and the pressure Shizuo is offering there in some half-formed thought of holding Izaya down and stripping him to skin at the same time, as if there’s any way to achieve the two together. Shizuo can’t parse the separate pieces, can’t collect himself enough to even make a reasonable guess; so he does the only thing he can do, the only thing his heat-dizzy thoughts will let him do, and he doesn’t stop.

“I love you,” he says, because he’s said it before but it’s different like this, with Izaya’s gaze fixed with breathless intensity on him, as if there’s some pane of glass that’s absent now, lost somewhere between stepping out into the night a few hours before and him opening his eyes to gasp himself back into the existence that Celty granted him, that Celty granted _them_ to have together again. “I’ve loved you for a long time, I think.”

Izaya’s eyes are still soft; but his mouth tightens, tugging up at the corner into the flicker of a smile, just for a heartbeat. Shizuo’s never seen anything so beautiful. “You think?” There’s an edge on his voice too, the beginning of laughter threatening far back in his throat; it makes Shizuo’s chest tighten, makes him lean in closer even than he was in instinctive, unthought need to be closer, nearer, to feel the curve of Izaya’s mouth against his instead of just seeing the smile rising to visibility.

“Yeah,” Shizuo says, and then he’s kissing Izaya, and Izaya’s letting him, shutting his eyes in surrender to the friction and humming some soft sound of pleasure Shizuo thinks he wasn’t meant to hear. Against his pants Izaya’s touch is drawing up, is pushing at the button and dragging against the pull of the zipper, but Shizuo is moving with as much intention, sliding his fingers up under the hem of Izaya’s shirt to urge the cloth up and off the tremor of the other’s stomach. Izaya is warm to the touch, his skin flushed with the heat of Shizuo’s blood and the thrum of desire in equal parts, and Shizuo can’t stand to be so far away from him, can hardly bear the few inches of space between his body and Izaya’s. He’s pressing closer instead, careless of the difficulty this presents to Izaya’s efforts with his pants or his own with Izaya’s shirt; it’s worth it, even the delay is worth it for the way Izaya’s skin presses warm against his, for the way Shizuo can feel every shift the other takes telegraphed close against the weight of his chest. He pulls away from Izaya’s mouth, just for a moment; Izaya’s lashes are still shadowing his eyes, there’s a long moment where Shizuo can see his throat working on a needless breath of want before he opens his eyes enough to look up at Shizuo over him.

“I should have realized earlier,” Shizuo says, and he’s pushing Izaya’s shirt higher, up over the shift of ribs close under blue-pale skin and the outline of bone forming a cage around the silent stillness of Izaya’s heart. But he’s still here, still staring up at Shizuo and warm and flushed underneath him, and Shizuo is sure he doesn’t deserve this many second chances but he’s sharply, painfully grateful for them all the same. “When I saw you fall that first night I thought--” He cuts himself off, shakes his head to clear it of the remembered horror of that moment. “I need you with me.”

Izaya’s lashes dip, his hand slides through Shizuo’s hair. His fingers are very gentle against the other’s skin; Shizuo can feel the tracery of the other’s fingerprints drawing carefully over the rhythm of his pulse in his throat. “Even like this?” he asks. He curves his back, arching himself up against Shizuo’s touch; the movement presses his chest hard against the weight of the other’s palm, makes the stillness inside his ribcage the more obvious. “Even as a monster?”

Shizuo stares at Izaya for a moment: at the glow of his eyes, the sharp edges of the teeth pressing to his lip, the strange washed-out pale of his skin. He doesn’t look human, even without the unmoving line of his throat and the evident lack of a heartbeat under Shizuo’s hand; he looks like something different, something uncanny and beautiful and dangerous. But the longer Shizuo looks the more he looks the same, the way he always did, as if his turning has just brought to the surface the Izaya Shizuo has always known, as if all the details of siren-song beauty were always there for Shizuo’s gaze even if no one else’s, and Shizuo thinks he’s always been willing to bleed for Izaya.

“Even as you,” Shizuo says, and then he leans in to kiss Izaya to quiet before he can find the words to muster a protest for that. Izaya shuts his eyes to the pressure, surrendering in action if not in word, and Shizuo lets his touch skip up to push at the collar of Izaya’s coat and urge it down and off the other’s shoulders. Izaya draws his touch away from Shizuo’s pants for a moment, long enough to slide his arms free of his jacket sleeves, and Shizuo takes the opportunity to pull at the other’s shirt as well, dragging at the fabric until Izaya lifts his arms over his head to capitulate to the force of Shizuo’s pull. Shizuo pushes the shirt aside along with the coat, forgetting both as soon as he urges them free, and underneath him there’s just Izaya, staring at up him with his lips parted on the rush of breathing more habitual than necessary and his skin laid bare for the faint glow of moonlight through the window and the weight of Shizuo’s gaze on him. Shizuo has to reach out, has to press his palms in against the outline of Izaya’s ribs under his skin and the dip of Izaya’s waist down to narrow hips; Izaya hisses at the contact, his back arching him up in involuntary response to the friction, and Shizuo ducks down without thinking to press his mouth to Izaya’s shoulder, to kiss against the angle of his collarbones, to trail down the midline of his chest. Izaya’s hand catches at his hair, fingers winding to desperate strength against the strands, but Shizuo keeps going, working a path across Izaya’s skin with his mouth while he fumbles his way along the line of the other’s pants to find the fastenings at the front of them.

Izaya’s skin is cool under his mouth, like rain formed into the shape of a human form underneath him; but he’s hot against his pants, Shizuo can feel the flushed resistance of the other’s length pressing at the denim before he even finds out the buckle of the belt holding Izaya’s jeans on. The buckle opens to his touch, Izaya’s jeans follow suit, and by the time Shizuo is sliding his fingers in and under the burden of Izaya’s clothes the other is panting for air, his whole body taut like he’s trying to hold himself back from some desperate want. Shizuo doesn’t know what it is Izaya wants, isn’t sure how to read the drag of the fingers in his hair; but it’s enough, he thinks, to push the other’s clothes down to his knees, to slide his hands free so he can fumble at Izaya’s boots with half his attention while the rest is dedicated to fitting his mouth to the dip of Izaya’s hip and down along the line of bone under delicate skin that leads to the curving heat of his cock.

“You smell good,” Shizuo says against Izaya’s hip, murmuring the words into only the vaguest coherency as he pulls the other’s boot free and lets it fall to join coat and shirt somewhere in the realm of unimportance. “How do you always smell so good?”

“It must be a vampire thing,” Izaya says, but he doesn’t sound as vicious over the words as he usually does; he sounds breathless instead, like he’s trying and failing to modulate his breathing into something even and calm. He draws his foot free of the tangle of his pants without being prompted, loosing himself from the accidental bondage before Shizuo can do it for him; he huffs relief as he tips his leg out wide, angling his knee open so Shizuo can see the tremor of tension running all along the inside of his thigh. “To lure in humans to feed from.”

Shizuo shakes his head. “No,” he says, and reaches out to touch his fingers to the inside of Izaya’s leg, to trace the pale line of it up from knee to the shadows creasing just below Izaya’s flushed cock, right alongside the weight of his balls. He can see the muscle under his fingers jump with the friction, can hear the sound of Izaya hissing a ticklish inhale at the contact, and he shuts his eyes and turns his face in to press his nose to Izaya’s hip and breathe in against the skin there. “You’ve always smelled like this.”

There’s a pause, a moment of time marked by silence so complete Shizuo can feel it tremor with possibility in the air. Then: “Ah,” Izaya says, and shifts his leg under Shizuo as if to remind the other of the remaining boot he’s still wearing. “Well. Maybe you were always meant to be my prey, Shizu-chan.”

He means it to be teasing. Shizuo knows that, can hear the attempt on the other’s voice as clearly as he can feel the tremor that undoes the humor in the words running through Izaya’s thigh held open under his palm.

“Maybe,” Shizuo says, and opens his mouth at Izaya’s hip to catch the fragile skin there between his teeth, to nip the shadow of a bruise against the pale skin. Izaya gasps at the sensation, his hips jerking up in involuntary response to Shizuo’s teeth on him, and Shizuo closes his hold at the other’s boot to pull it free with more strength than care. Izaya’s pants go the way of his shoes, pushed off to fall over the end of the bed as fast as Shizuo can drag them free, and then Shizuo is fitting his fingers in against Izaya’s knee, bracing the heat of his palms against the cool inside of the other’s thighs to trail against the soft skin there as he works his way across Izaya’s hip across and down, until he can brush his lips to the soft, dark hair curling against the base of the other’s cock. Izaya makes a desperate sound in the back of his throat, something plaintive and needy without any words to go with it, and Shizuo can feel his whole body come alight in answer, as if he has stood ready all his life to answer that plea in the back of Izaya’s throat. He draws back by an inch, tips his head down over Izaya’s hips, and he’s lowering his mouth almost as fast as he parts his lips, letting the head of the other’s cock against his mouth urge his lips to slide apart around it so he can take the heat of Izaya’s length over his tongue and into the warm friction of his mouth. Izaya chokes on an inhale, his chest flexing him into silence as his whole body curves up to meet Shizuo, and Shizuo shuts his eyes and presses in closer, farther, until the whole of his mouth is filled with the salt heat of Izaya sliding slick over his tongue. Izaya tastes like metal, like copper and iron and salt all at once; Shizuo can breathe Izaya into his lungs, can swallow the taste of the other down his throat, and he can feel his cock swelling hotter against the open front of his pants, can feel his body straining with desire too strong to even form itself into a clear goal. There’s the thud of his heart pounding in his chest, the shift of his cock aching with dull heat against his hips, and at his mouth, against his lips, Izaya shuddering, Izaya gasping off tiny broken-short noises with every movement of Shizuo’s lips over him.

“Shizu-chan,” he manages, panting out the sounds as Shizuo draws up by an inch, dragging his lips slow over the curve of the other’s cock to catch the slick heat against his tongue. “I’m--” and then Shizuo slides back down, following out the suggestion of Izaya’s length against his lips, and Izaya cuts himself off into a hiss of heat so sharp it sounds closer to pain than pleasure. His legs flex under Shizuo’s fingers, his body tries to thrust up against the resistance of the other’s hold, and Shizuo moves again, too drawn in by the reflexive movement of Izaya’s body under him to resist. Izaya’s shifting under him, his body straining as he lifts a hand free of Shizuo’s hair and away from the other’s skin, but Shizuo doesn’t look up, doesn’t even open his eyes; he’s held in place by what he’s doing, the whole of his attention given over to the slow rhythm he’s forming of his lips and mouth and tongue as he moves over Izaya. He wants to keep going, wants to draw the tension building under the weight of his hands to impossible heights and feel it give way into shuddering pleasure, wants to taste the bitter salt of Izaya’s orgasm against the back of his tongue; and then there’s a touch at his shoulder, fingers dragging against his arm, and “Your hand,” Izaya’s saying, his voice taut with strain but perfectly coherent all the same. “Give me your hand, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo can’t make sense of this for a moment. It’s too distant from what he’s currently doing, too far removed from his present focus; he has to pull away before he can piece together the words, has to open his eyes to blink up at Izaya while he struggles for understanding. Izaya has his hand extended, his fingers turned up expectantly; he gestures sharply as Shizuo looks up, his mouth drawing down into a frown of impatience as he does.

“Your _hand_ ,” he says, and reaches down to grab at Shizuo’s wrist, to close his fingers in hard against the flutter of Shizuo’s pulse under the skin. “Are you deaf?” Shizuo submits to the urging of the other’s pull, compliant even while he wonders what Izaya intends; is he going to pull the other’s wrist to his lips, is he going to press his teeth to Shizuo’s skin and let the rush of the other’s heartbeat spill adrenaline-soaked blood down his throat? The idea alone is enough to weight Shizuo’s lashes with desire, enough to draw the shape of a moan from his throat; but Izaya just pulls his arm up to his waist, pushing hard at Shizuo’s skin until the other turns his hand palm-up in confused obedience. Then he lets go, drawing his fingers free of Shizuo’s hair as he does so, and Shizuo is left to blink heat-dazed confusion as Izaya fumbles over the sheets, his head ducked down with attention. It’s not until he emerges with a tiny bottle that Shizuo realizes what he intends, and then the arousal that runs through him is too much for him to offer anything but a whimpering groan as Izaya upends the bottle over his outstretched fingers.

“Oh,” Shizuo manages, his heart racing as his fingers go slick with the liquid Izaya is spilling over them. “Izaya.”

“You can go fast,” Izaya says, aiming for what Shizuo thinks is meant as a businesslike tone and just comes out sounding hurried and desperate. “I can take a lot more abuse now than I could.”

“Fuck,” Shizuo says. His fingers are slippery to the touch, they skim wet over each other when he curls his hand; he can’t find words in the hum of anticipation building hot in his thoughts. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You’re not going to hurt me,” Izaya says in that same rushed tone, the words toppling over each other like he can’t get them out fast enough. “I’ll be fine.”

Shizuo draws his hand back in towards himself, barely sparing the slick shine over his skin a glance before he looks back up to Izaya. Izaya is staring at his fingers, his gaze heavy and lips parted; Shizuo can see his throat work on the effort of a swallow for a moment, can see the color of heat staining the other’s cheeks even in the dim of the room. He doesn’t look up to meet Shizuo’s gaze until Shizuo says “Izaya,” clear and deliberate against the humidity in the air, and even then his gaze is dark, the supernatural glow of his eyes dimmed down to a smoulder by the burden of his lashes. They stare at each other for a long moment, Shizuo gazing up at Izaya while Izaya’s breathing works with visible effort in his chest; and then Izaya swallows, and blinks, and says “Please” so softly it’s only the absolute quiet in the room that lets Shizuo hear it.

Shizuo’s entire body goes hot. He can feel it like a wave, like a rush of desire cresting through every inch of him to draw him into obedience, into surrender, into whatever those dark-lidded eyes ask of him. He’s moving before he thinks, before he’s answered; and besides, he doesn’t need words for this reply anyway, not when it’s clear in every movement of his body. He reaches out instead, bracing his thumb against the inside of Izaya’s thigh to trace up to the shadows of the other’s body, and when his fingers touch against the other’s entrance he’s still watching Izaya’s face, his attention is still fixed on the darkened brilliance of the other’s eyes. He can see Izaya’s mouth come open on a silent exhale, can see the shift of reflexive breathing catch in the other’s chest as Izaya stares at him; and then Shizuo moves, and pushes in against Izaya with a finger, and he watches Izaya’s lashes flutter closed, watches Izaya’s lips part on an unvoiced moan of response. Izaya’s hot to the touch, his body flexing tight against the intrusion of Shizuo’s finger inside him; but his expression is going softer the deeper Shizuo pushes, like all his composure is giving way as fast as Shizuo urges in against him. Shizuo’s heart is pounding, his mind is racing, and he’s moving without conscious thought, shifting up the bed as he lets his hold on Izaya’s leg go to brace himself alongside the other’s waist instead, as he leans in to close the distance between himself and the flutter of reaction over Izaya’s face.

“Shizu-chan,” Izaya starts, his voice skipping over tension in the back of his throat, and then Shizuo’s touch dips in deeper and he cuts himself off into a groan, his body flexing under and around Shizuo moving over him.

“You’re so warm,” Shizuo says, the words inane but his voice breaking over the strain of his awareness of the moment, of the overwhelming immediacy of being so close, of feeling Izaya pressing so tight around him. “God, Izaya, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Izaya says, breaking the words off short in the back of his throat. “Give me more, Shizu-chan.”

“Are you sure?” Shizuo asks, but he’s not waiting for an answer; he can see Izaya’s sincerity in the set of the other’s mouth and in the tension all across the line of his shoulders. He draws his touch back by an inch, thrusts in faster and harder at once, and Izaya rewards him immediately by dropping his head back against the sheets under him and hissing past the tension of a groan in the back of his throat. The angle curves his neck back into a pale curve of elegance, strains tension all along the line of it, and Shizuo’s attention drops to hover there, his focus clinging to the pale of the other’s throat as he draws his hand back for another thrust. He can see Izaya’s reaction work along his neck, can watch the pressure of the other’s jaw clenching against the strain of Shizuo working into him, and Shizuo’s moving faster without thinking, urging Izaya open around his touch the quicker just to watch the flickering strain of response in the other’s body. He presses in with another finger without waiting for Izaya to tell him, reading the easing of the other’s body from the curve of Izaya’s neck and the rhythm of Izaya’s breathing as much as from the tension bearing down against the slick thrust of his touch, and as Izaya shudders into the pressure of it Shizuo leans in over him, pressing his mouth to Izaya’s collarbone to trace his way up against the pale of the other’s throat as he works his fingers as deep into the grip of Izaya’s body as he can reach.

Izaya’s trembling under him, now, his body clenching and easing in time with the drive of Shizuo’s fingers, and Shizuo is pressing his mouth to Izaya’s throat, is tasting the cool of the other’s skin under his lips as he urges space into the heat of Izaya’s body. Izaya turns his head in surrender to the contact, his hand comes up to settle against Shizuo’s hair, and between his legs Shizuo angles his wrist to touch a third finger alongside the first two. Izaya huffs a breath, lets his knees open wider in silent encouragement, and Shizuo pushes against him, pressing hard against the resistance of the other’s body to stretch him wider. There’s a moment of tension, a heartbeat’s worth of involuntary strain; and then Izaya is gusting an exhale, and easing to Shizuo’s force, and Shizuo is sliding forward and into the other, feeling his heart skip on disbelieving appreciation as his touch presses forward into Izaya’s body. He tips his head against Izaya’s neck, opening his mouth to offer the heat of his breathing against the other’s skin, and at his hair Izaya’s fingers tighten, the other’s grip bracing at Shizuo’s head as if to hold him still while Izaya exhales through a shaky laugh.

“Did I miss a memo?” he asks, his voice trembling nearly as badly as his body under Shizuo’s touch. “I thought the biting was meant to be my role, Shizu-chan, not yours.”

“I’m not biting you,” Shizuo tells him without lifting his head. His fingers are almost entirely inside Izaya; he draws them back slow, easing out halfway so he can slide through another forward motion. “I just like your neck.”

“Do you?” Izaya asks, his fingers tensing to make the question rhetorical. He’s breathing fast, his inhales coming in short, shallow gasps; Shizuo can feel the pull of them in the other’s chest under his. “Maybe you should have been the vampire all along. Goodness knows you have the strength for it.”

“Maybe,” Shizuo agrees. Izaya is straining against his touch; he draws back fractionally before pushing back in, working through tiny, rocking movements with his wrist to urge the other’s body to relaxation.

“I could still turn you,” Izaya tells him. He’s lying flat over the bed now, his body relaxing to the strain of Shizuo’s touch; Shizuo can feel only the tiniest tremors running through him, now, with each forward thrust of the other’s fingers. “Bring you to the verge of death and feed you my blood, or make Celty feed you hers.” His hand slides down to Shizuo’s neck, his fingers tense against the skin. “We could spend an eternity together as monsters.”

Shizuo is supposed to balk. He’s sure of it, sure that Izaya is expecting him to hiss rejection at the idea, to flinch away and balk and leave the other to laugh off the whole suggestion as a joke. But Izaya’s words go through him like flame, skid his heart out for a missed beat like it’s already reaching for the immortal existence the other is suggesting, like his body is going hot instead of chill with the idea of endless nights with Izaya, with them together for an eternity of shared existence.

“Yes,” Shizuo says, and he bites at Izaya’s neck, hard, digging the blunt edges of his teeth in against the porcelain-pale of the other’s skin. Izaya gasps at the pressure, his spine arching into the friction, and Shizuo leans into him, lets the weight of his body bear the other down against the bed as he stalls the stroke of his fingers to feel the reflexive clenching of Izaya’s body tightening around him. It feels good, to have Izaya shuddering for air under him, to feel the heat of the other’s skin flushing to arousal against his own; but it’s not enough, it’s not close enough, Shizuo needs to be nearer, needs to have all his skin pressed close to the silk-smooth cool of Izaya’s. He eases the press of his teeth, lets the force lighten into the promise of a bruise instead of the threat of blood, and when he pulls away he draws his fingers free too, sliding them back and out of Izaya’s body while the other is still quaking with relieved tension over the sheets. It’s easy to shrug his loose shirt off his shoulders to shed the weight of it from his skin, and by the time he’s tossing it sideways and over the edge of the bed Izaya is pushing himself to sit up too, reaching out to catch his fingers under the open waistband of Shizuo’s pants while Shizuo fumbles with the laces on his shoes.

“You’re wearing too much,” Izaya informs him as Shizuo gets one shoe free and drops it to turns his attention to the other. Izaya’s hands are pressing close against his hips, Izaya’s fingers are digging in against the fragile skin at the very tops of his thighs; Shizuo huffs with the pressure, the force enough to be painful if he weren’t so all-over hot with too much arousal to stand. His other shoe comes free and joins the first on the floor, and then he’s struggling to push his pants down over his knees and off his legs while Izaya settles his fingers in close against Shizuo’s hips, bracing his grip as tight as if he means to bracket the other’s body between the span of his fingers. Shizuo shoves his clothes free and away over the bed, out of the span of his attention if not actually over the edge to the floor; it doesn’t matter anyway, they’re not important, not when Izaya is leaning back over the bed and drawing Shizuo in over him via his grip at the other’s skin. Izaya lands over the sheets, huffing an exhale as of relief as Shizuo tips in over him, and Shizuo braces a hand over Izaya’s shoulder to take his weight as he looks down to the open angle of Izaya’s legs underneath him.

“There,” Izaya says, “now we’re even.” He’s struggling for teasing -- Shizuo can make out the attempt at laughter in the other’s throat -- but he’s looking down, too, when Shizuo glances up at his face, his gaze cast down to linger at the heat of Shizuo’s cock flushed and heavy between his legs. Izaya’s cheeks are warm, radiant with heat borrowed from Shizuo’s veins and Shizuo’s body; underneath Shizuo he angles his knees wider, sliding his legs apart across the sheets and bracing his heels hard against the mattress. His fingers tighten, his arms flex; and Shizuo lets his weight come forward, lets the tug of Izaya’s hand at him pull him in and down while his attention stays focused on the details of the other’s face so close to his. Izaya’s mouth is barely open, his lips parted over the sharp edges of those teeth and the rush of warm breath working in his lungs; his lashes are casting feathery dark across his cheeks, his hair is tangled into artistic beauty across his forehead. There’s a mark against his throat, the rising bruise of Shizuo’s teeth set there by his earlier bite; if it weren’t for the cool of his skin and the still, pulseless line of his throat Shizuo would think him human, would think them still the C3 partners they have always been, before. But it was never like this, before, he never had Izaya’s hands bracing at his skin or Izaya’s legs open around his hips; and then Izaya’s grip urges him down, and Shizuo’s cock bumps to drag over slick skin, and all thoughts of the vague past disintegrate into the immediate, overwhelming detail of the present.

“So,” Izaya says, and his gaze lifts from the shadow between their bodies, the faint crimson glow of his eyes fixing on Shizuo over him. “Do you need instructions on what to do next?”

“No,” Shizuo says, and he reaches down to close his free hand at Izaya’s hip, and he rocks his weight forward to thrust hard against the heat promised by the other’s body. There’s a flicker of hesitation, a moment of Izaya’s eyes going wider as he hisses an inhale; and then the head of Shizuo’s cock slides forward, and Izaya’s body opens to the intrusion, and Shizuo groans heat as he watches Izaya’s head go back, as he watches Izaya’s throat work on a moan that goes unvoiced for lack of air in the other’s lungs. He can see the points of the other’s teeth against the shadow of his mouth, can see the scarlet red of Izaya’s lips like temptation, like an unspoken plea for a kiss, and he’s leaning in without thinking, pressing a kiss to the corner of the other’s open mouth as he sinks deeper into the grip of Izaya’s body, as he feels the tremor of the other’s reactions tighten and flex around his cock. Izaya turns his head, his mouth pressing and dragging over Shizuo’s for a brief, sweet spill of friction; and then he’s reaching for the other’s hair, and turning his head in pursuit of the other’s neck, and Shizuo angles his head to the side as Izaya’s mouth slides to fit close against his skin.

There’s the pressure of sharp points, the force familiar against the faint, lingering ache of that first bite at Shizuo’s neck; and then Izaya’s teeth sink into Shizuo’s skin, and Shizuo’s throat tightens over a moan that spills in time with the rush of his blood into Izaya’s mouth. He’s gasping against Izaya, his shoulders flexing as his body tips down, as he presses skin-close against Izaya’s body under his, and Izaya’s fingers are fisting at his hair, Izaya’s palm is sliding open up against the curve of Shizuo’s waist to brace at his shoulder. His legs are angling around Shizuo’s hips, his heels fitting in against the dip of the other’s back, and when he pulls Shizuo moves without thinking, obedience to the urging of Izaya’s touch coming easy and reflexive with the heat in his body. His cock slides deep, sinking far into the tension of Izaya under him; and Izaya sucks hard at his neck, bringing a surge of heat through Shizuo’s body that leaves him trembling in helpless surrender to the pleasure of Izaya’s mouth at his neck and the dragging satisfaction of Izaya’s body around his length. He’s moving harder, deeper, his fingers bracing tight at Izaya’s hip to hold the other still against the force of his forward thrusts, but Izaya’s not resisting, Izaya’s going more pliant instead, it’s like he’s melting to the force of Shizuo’s movement, or as if the spill of the other’s blood over his tongue is heating all the cool in his veins to an open flame. Shizuo’s thoughts are going dizzy, his head is spinning, his fingers are going numb; but everything is building in his chest, along his spine, his whole existence is drawing tight and crystalline around those points of contact with Izaya beneath him. He’s panting, gasping for air, trying to hold himself steady against the slow slide of gravity away from him; and then Izaya’s mouth draws away from his skin, and Izaya’s voice says “Shizu-chan,” strange and echoey like it’s coming from a long way away.

“Oh,” Shizuo says, and his voice is odd too, the sounds are difficult to form against his lips. “Izaya.” He pauses, stills the rhythmic movement of his body; the cessation of motion makes it easier to gasp for air, but his head is still spinning, his vision still flickering towards dark when he opens his eyes to blink hard towards clarity. “What...are you okay?”

“I am,” Izaya says, and his hands are both at Shizuo’s face, now, his thumbs sliding over the other’s cheeks to urge his head up and away from the curve of Izaya’s shoulder. “You’re not.”

“What?” Shizuo repeats, blinking hard. Izaya’s hands are startlingly strong at his face; he feels like the other’s hold is completely inescapable. “I’m. I’m fine.”

Izaya’s mouth catches on a flicker of a smile, a brief flutter of amusement to match the huff of air at his lips. “You’re as pale as I am,” he says. “You need to lie down.”

“I will,” Shizuo says, and leans in against the brace of Izaya’s hands to reach for the other’s mouth, to stretch over the distance between them to touch his lips to the other’s. Izaya’s mouth is wet against his, the soft of his lips warmed by the spill of Shizuo’s blood. “After.”

Izaya’s lips shift over that smile again. “No,” he says, “now” and he’s pushing, and Shizuo is falling, his whole world is spinning wildly around him. He feels like he’s coming untethered from the earth, like his consciousness is fracturing and scattering out into the ether; and then there’s soft under his shoulders, the support of the bed catching the wild fall of his awareness and smoothing it into comfort and stability. He blinks hard, trying to orient his vision back to clarity, and Izaya’s there, leaning in over him so his hair falls soft against Shizuo’s forehead and his lashes shift to shadow close over the other’s.

“I drank too much from you,” he murmurs, his mouth ghosting against Shizuo’s like the illusion of a kiss as his palms slide gently across the other’s face. Shizuo sighs a breath, turning his head up in pursuit of that delicate friction, and Izaya lets him have the contact, lets Shizuo’s mouth fit against his as Shizuo lifts his hand to skim over the other’s bare shoulder and against the dip of Izaya’s collarbone under his skin. Izaya’s warm to the touch, flushed all across his shoulder and down the curve of his arm; and then he’s drawing back, tipping away to sit back over his heels as he braces a hand at Shizuo’s chest and spreads his fingers wide to hold himself steady, or maybe to hold Shizuo down for the consideration of his dark eyes. “You need to lie still for a few minutes.”

“I’m fine,” Shizuo says again, even though his vision is still hazy and his thoughts are drifting to distraction in his head. Izaya is beautiful in the faint light from the window, his pale skin almost glowing in the minimal illumination; Shizuo can brace his hand at the curve of the other’s back, can fit the angle of Izaya’s hip against the weight of his palm. “I can handle this.”

Izaya’s mouth flickers. “I know,” he says, and he leans forward, his weight bearing down against the hand at Shizuo’s chest until Shizuo can feel the pressure against his breathing, can feel the force weighting hard against his chest. He catches an inhale against the force of Izaya’s palm, feels his heart beating faster as if in answer to the unspoken request of the other’s touch; and over him Izaya moves, rocking his weight forward to lean hard against his bracing hand before he slides back down over the resistance of Shizuo’s cock.

The sound Shizuo makes is completely inadvertent. He doesn’t think through his reaction, doesn’t have the coherency to manage it even if he tried; there’s just the heat, and the friction, the slick drag of Izaya moving over him to fuck himself on Shizuo’s cock, and Shizuo can’t offer anything to that but a low groan of all the heat in his dizzy body. His fingers flex, his hips buck up in involuntary response, and over him Izaya hisses a moan, his hand shifting down Shizuo’s chest to bear down against the tension in the other’s stomach instead of the shape of his ribs over the pull of air in his lungs. Izaya’s head tips forward, his hair falls in front of his face, and when he moves again Shizuo can see the full effort of the action running through the whole of the other’s body, from the strain of his legs to the shift of his shoulders as he holds himself still. He’s tighter like this, Shizuo thinks, or maybe it’s just that Shizuo himself can spare the thought for it, can spare the attention to notice the way Izaya’s body opens to him with each downward slide of the other’s hips, the way Izaya clenches tighter around him in time with the faint moan of heat that comes with each rocking movement. Shizuo is still lightheaded from blood loss, his awareness is still drifting from point to point with every dip of his lashes; but Izaya is clear, from the dark shadow of his parted lips to the pale curve of his thighs to the flushed heat of his cock straining taut towards his stomach like it’s seeking out friction of its own. Izaya’s lashes are cast down, his whole expression gone slack with the attention he’s giving to his movement, and in the midst of Shizuo’s hazy distraction it seems like an obvious step to draw his hand away from Izaya’s hip and down instead, to reach and wind his fingers against the heat-heavy curve of the other’s length.

Izaya jerks with the contact. Shizuo can feel the tension run through the whole of the other’s body, can feel Izaya clench hard around Shizuo’s cock inside him as his back arches, as his eyes go wide and startled with the sensation. It feels good, Shizuo notes distantly, but it’s Izaya he’s thinking of when he draws his hand up in a slow stroke over heated skin, and it’s Izaya’s face he’s watching when the other’s lashes flutter into heat, when the other’s spine curves back with involuntary appreciation.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, and he moves again, faster this time, tightening his grip and pulling up in a long stroke that runs from the dark curls at Izaya’s hips to the slick droplets of liquid spilling at the head of the other’s cock. Izaya shudders through the whole of his body, his thighs flexing helplessly in response, and Shizuo’s breathing is coming faster, his own building arousal spiking higher with this proof of Izaya’s. Izaya shifts his weight again, grinding himself up and back like he’s trying to take Shizuo impossibly farther inside himself, and it’s Shizuo’s turn to groan, now, to give voice to the rush of heat that runs out into him from the feel of Izaya sliding around him.

He pushes up onto an elbow, aiming for what height he can win from the dizzy spin of his thoughts in his head, and Izaya tips backwards in response, reaching behind himself to brace a hand at Shizuo’s thigh as he works himself through another slow thrust down onto Shizuo’s length. Shizuo can feel Izaya tensing hard around the length of his cock, can feel the flush of Izaya’s body pressing hotter and harder against the pull of his hand; he has the other caught perfectly between the two, even the arch of his back is bracing him still at those two fixed points. The thought makes Shizuo struggle for breath, makes his heart race quicker, and as Izaya starts to move faster Shizuo’s hand slides up from the dip of his back over his waist, around and up the shift of Izaya’s speeding breathing in his chest. Izaya’s skin is soft to the touch, pale like moonlight caught into the semblance of flesh and blood under Shizuo’s fingertips, and it flushes to color in the wake of the other’s touch, his body darkening with the heat of Shizuo’s blood in his veins as Shizuo traces up against the line of Izaya’s chest, up across the taut point of a nipple and higher, to the angle of sharp collarbones and against the curve of the other’s throat. Izaya’s head tips to the side under the press of Shizuo’s fingers, his lashes fluttering closed as his mouth comes open in a gesture more openly submissive than words could be, and Shizuo presses his palm close to Izaya’s skin, cradles the rising bruise left by his teeth against the gentle weight of his hand. Izaya is warm to the touch, his breathing coming pantingly fast in his chest, and there might be no pulse to flutter under Shizuo’s palm but Shizuo doesn’t care, it doesn’t matter any more now than it ever has. Izaya is still himself, beautiful and real and _alive_ , here, with Shizuo, and that’s more than Shizuo thinks he can possibly deserve, at this point.

“God,” Shizuo says, his voice breaking in the back of his throat. “I love you, Izaya” and under his touch Izaya’s cock jerks, under his gaze Izaya’s mouth comes open on a soundless rush of an exhale. His fingers at Shizuo’s leg seize tight, his body clenches on the promise of inevitability; and Shizuo pulls over him, and bucks up to thrust harder into him, and Izaya’s expression falls slack and open as he groans himself into the heat of orgasm over Shizuo. His cock twitches in Shizuo’s hold, his body trembling as he spills wet heat over the tension of the other’s stomach and up against the strain of Shizuo’s chest, but it’s his face Shizuo is watching, the flutter of those inky lashes and the strain of his neck on the full-throated groan of heat Shizuo can feel catch all the want building in his veins into a knot of anticipatory tension. Izaya is shuddering over him, his expression gone slack and helpless to the convulsions of pleasure running through the whole of his body; and Shizuo can feel his own resistance give way in a rush, can feel everything in him go warm and radiant with the certainty of pleasure.

“Oh god,” he breathes, “Izaya” and his whole body arches upward, his legs and back and shoulders all tightening in one long, involuntary ripple as his head falls back and his vision blurs out to the all-encompassing white of heat. Izaya’s around him, over him, coming in time with him, and Shizuo can’t help the reflexive jolts bucking his hips up into the other with each surge of pleasure that rushes through him to pulse into Izaya’s body. Izaya’s curving in against him, tipping forward to catch his hand at Shizuo’s neck and gasp for air at Shizuo’s shoulder while his body thrums with aftershocks, and Shizuo slides his arm up over Izaya’s shoulders, and pulls the other in close against him, and lets the tremors of orgasm fade and ease into the simple comfort of Izaya pressing warm against him.

They’re very still for several minutes. Shizuo’s vision comes back into clarity with unhurried ease, his eyes focusing on the blank white of the ceiling overhead while his attention clings to the slide of his fingers through Izaya’s hair and the smell of the other’s skin filling his lungs with every inhale. Izaya doesn’t lift his head from Shizuo’s shoulder, doesn’t ease his grip on the other’s neck; the tension he’s exerting might be painful, Shizuo thinks, if Shizuo weren’t so grateful for the reassurance of Izaya’s presence that comes with the pressure of his fingers. As it is it feels comfortable, pleasant in a distant, dreamy way, and Shizuo has entirely lost track of time when Izaya takes a breath at his neck and offers words against the curve of his throat.

“I will,” he says, the words so distant from any sense of their context that Shizuo has a brief moment of dizzy confusion, a heartbeat where his mind skips to the sincerity of wedding vows, as if somehow finding their way into the same place is enough to tie the whole of their existences together from this point on as well. He’s about to ask, about to find the words for clarification; and then Izaya’s hand braces at the side of his neck, and Izaya opens his mouth against Shizuo’s skin, and Shizuo’s whole body goes hot with understanding, with the suggestion of eternity offered at the edge of Izaya’s teeth and the taste of Izaya’s blood. It’s only for a moment, only for a heartbeat; and then Izaya eases the weight of his teeth, and closes his mouth while Shizuo is still breathless with the implications of it. “Someday, I will.”

Shizuo stares at the ceiling overhead without seeing it, without really processing anything in the present for the distraction of the future unwinding in front of him. The glow of sunlight, the rhythm of his heartbeat, the familiar necessities of eating and breathing and sleeping; and the soft of shadows, the brilliance of Izaya’s crimson eyes, the weight of night to press around them both for years, decades, centuries, an endless eternity of time together. Shizuo’s arm tightens around Izaya’s shoulders, his fingers slide farther into the other’s hair; when he takes a breath it’s to struggle himself towards coherency, to give voice to the ache of desire so sunbright in his chest. “Okay.”

“You don’t mind?” Izaya asks the side of Shizuo’s neck, dragging the words soft so they’re a whisper more than given true voice. “I’ll be making a monster of you.”

Shizuo shakes his head. “I don’t care,” he says, and he’s shutting his eyes to the blank of the ceiling, and turning his head in to kiss against the silky dark of Izaya’s hair. “I want to stay with you.”

He can hear the breath Izaya takes at his shoulder, the inhale needless and still dragging rough over the threat of tears in the other’s throat. There’s a pause; then: “Okay,” Izaya says, and he’s turning his head, he’s lifting his chin to pull away from Shizuo’s mouth at his hair. Shizuo blinks his eyes open again, brings his vision back into focus on Izaya’s face as the other draws back to stare down at him from a distance of a few heat-heavy inches. Izaya’s lashes are heavy over his eyes, the weight of them shadowing the red of his gaze into something softer and darker; with the glow behind them eclipsed they look the way they used to, the way Shizuo has always before known them to look. His lips are soft and parted; Shizuo can’t see the edges of his telltale teeth, can’t call out the uncanny pale of Izaya’s skin for the flush of warmth clinging to the other’s cheeks. He looks himself, as he used to be, looks like himself as he still is; Shizuo’s heart aches with the surge of affection in him, with the pressure of adoration he has only just given a name to, that he thinks has been in him from the moment he saw the tug of Izaya’s mouth on that strange, sharp smile he always has had.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, and Izaya’s lashes flutter, his expression coming into clearer focus as if to answer Shizuo’s voice. “I love you.”

Izaya looks at him for a long moment. “I’m a monster, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo shakes his head in rejection of the claim, or rejection of the importance of it, the distinction is irrelevant in the moment. “I don’t care,” he says. “I still love you.”

Izaya’s mouth tugs, the corner of it drawing up with startling speed. His smile lights behind his eyes, brings out the glowing color from behind the curtain of his lashes as it shows the point of a sharp canine on one side.

“I love you too,” he says, and Shizuo can feel his whole body light up with a surge of happiness as Izaya’s smile pulls wider, as his gaze goes softer on Shizuo underneath him. “Shizu-chan.”

“Izaya,” Shizuo says. “Come here,” and he’s pulling Izaya down, and Izaya’s grip is urging him up, and as their mouths come together Shizuo can feel Izaya’s touch against him tighten and ease, can feel the sigh of an exhale Izaya spills against his skin the moment before Shizuo fits their mouths as close together as their bodies. Izaya tastes like copper, bright and sharp and brilliant, and when Shizuo leans back to pull him back down to the bed he follows without resistance, melting in against the other’s body like he’s dissolving under the force of Shizuo’s hold.

The sun has never been as beautiful as Izaya is in Shizuo’s arms.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [No one's Servant](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9478943) by [SareBear96](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SareBear96/pseuds/SareBear96)




End file.
